Steam Security Blunder
First up, do you remember my last news update, when I reported on how Steam had stepped up their security in a number of different ways to help counter hackers and the likes? Well it looks like they've done the hackers job for them...
Early last Friday, Steam accidentally leaked account details on over 34,000 users. Yes, somebody at Valve seriously goofed.
So here's how it all went down. On high traffic sites or services, such as Steam, it is common that the site or service will 'cache' the most visited pages on the site, such as the Home page or Store page. This is so that the site doesn't have to recreate the same page hundreds of thousands of time per minute, meaning the page will load much quicker as a result. Some sites also cache account information too, but you are the only one who will receive the information back.
Apparently the Steam store came under attack by hackers trying to DDOS the service. This then meant
that Steam's counter-DDOS measures swung into affect, and somehow changed the caching process behind-the-scenes. meaning that instead of users only seeing the Home page or their own personal details, they saw the private details of other users instead. Oops. However, as it was only a cached page, no changes could be made to the information by other users, they could only view the account information. Now this might not seem as bad, but the Accounts page on Steam shows your Card details, Home address, Phone number, Email, etc, meaning if you were one of the unlucky 34,000 who had their account information leaked, it is possible that someone now knows some of your personal details.
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| Were you affected by the blunder? |
Valve recently released a statement explaining the whole incident:
- "Early Christmas morning (Pacific Standard Time), the Steam Store was the target of a DoS attack which prevented the serving of store pages to users. Attacks against the Steam Store, and Steam in general, are a regular occurrence that Valve handles both directly and with the help of partner companies, and typically do not impact Steam users. During the Christmas attack, traffic to the Steam store increased 2000 per cent over the average traffic during the Steam Sale.
- "In response to this specific attack, caching rules managed by a Steam web caching partner were deployed in order to both minimise the impact on Steam Store servers and continue to route legitimate user traffic. During the second wave of this attack, a second caching configuration was deployed that incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store responses which were generated for other users. Incorrect Store responses varied from users seeing the front page of the Store displayed in the wrong language, to seeing the account page of another user.
- "Once this error was identified, the Steam Store was shut down and a new caching configuration was deployed. The Steam Store remained down until we had reviewed all caching configurations, and we received confirmation that the latest configurations had been deployed to all partner servers and that all cached data on edge servers had been purged.
- "We will continue to work with our web caching partner to identify affected users and to improve the process used to set caching rules going forward. We apologise to everyone whose personal information was exposed by this error, and for interruption of Steam Store service."
The store is now back up and running, but people are now feeling uneasy when using Steam and the store, and honestly, who can blame them!
Star Wars Sells Big
Next up, that big new Star Wars game you ma have heard about, yes, I'm talking about Battlefront! Well apparently, the sales figures have come in for it's first two months, and by the looks of it, it did pretty well.
According to the figures, Star Wars: Battlefront sold a whopping 12 million copies in it's first two months. Battlefront sold around 6 million copies seperately in the month of November and December and as each copy cost around £40/$55, that means Star Wars: Battlefront made around £450 million/$660 million in total. Good job EA!
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| Don't mess with the Trooper... |
Now, unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that Star Wars: The Force Awakens' came out in late December. Putting two and two together, it's easy to see that the new movie definitely had a part to play in generating sales for the game, as well as Christmas and such.
According to sales figures, Battlefront was third in the overall sales for November, behind Fallout 4 and Black Ops 3. So it's safe to say that Battlefront has done well for itself, especially as the game was targeted to reach 13 million copies sold by March 2016!
Battlefront is a great game, and I would definitely reccomend purchasing it! As you may remember, I did post my Top 3 games of 2015 a couple of weeks ago. Before I wrote that post, I hadn't played Battlefront. Now after playing it, I most definitely believe that Battlefront would give both Rainbow Six: Siege and Rocket League a run for their money! What do you think? Let me know in the comments down below!
Dedication Or What?
Finally, one Japanese gamer may have just won the award for most dedication (if there is one) after leaving his SNES turned on for twenty years to ensure he didn't lose his save game data!
The unamed gamer, who goes only by his Twitter handle @UMIHARAKawase insisted on leaving his SNES on after realising that if he turned it off, he would probably lose his save data that he had worked so hard on getting.
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| The SNES plugged in and ready to go... |
The game in question, Umihara Kawase (so that's where he got his Twitter handle from!!) is a platforming game that was released way back in 1994. He recently tweeted a picture (right) of his SNES still running with the Umihara Kawase game cartrdige still plugged into the console, with the console running.
Siliconera explains why the fan needed to keep his console running to ensure he does not lose his save data.
"The reason he has had the game running this long is that he doesn’t want to lose his save data. To explain, some old game cartridges used Static RAM (SRAM) with lithium-ion batteries. This meant that the cartridge could hold your saved data with the SRAM as long as the battery stayed charged. "
So it turns out that Umihara Kawase is one of those older cartridges that will eventually lose all of your data if the battery loses it charge, therefore, the fan had to ensure his console remained turned on to keep the cartridge fully charged so he loses none of his save data.
So that's all for this week! What do you think of this week's news? Were you affected by the Steam security blunder? Have you played Battlefront yet?? Do you think you'll ever be as dedicated as that fan was? Let me know in the comments down below!
As always, thanks for reading!
Connor :)
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