Valve Addresses Christmas Day Steam Issues

<p>On Christmas day&comma; many Steam users experienced a weird moment&colon; they were viewing the store under someone else&&num;8217&semi;s account&period; This provided users with the ability to see private information such as billing addresses&comma; email addresses&comma; the last four digits of Steam Guard phone numbers and&sol;or the last two digits of credit card numbers&period; Valve shut down the store soon after realizing the mistake&comma; but had stayed relatively quiet about what had happened&period; The Steam Store&&num;8217&semi;s Twitter account did not even address any of the issues&comma; despite having roughly 3&period;5 million followers that could have been notified&comma; as well as no comment from their Facebook account that has over 4 million likes&period; Finally&comma; Valve has broken their silence and explained what happened&comma; what they are doing to remedy the situation&comma; and who exactly was affected by the breach of privacy&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>In short&comma; it looks like Steam was the subject of a DoS attack between 11&colon;50 and 13&colon;20 PST&period; A frequent occurrence&comma; they often are able to counter the issue of a DoS attack&comma; but store traffic was over 2000&percnt; what it normally is on Christmas morning&period; This caused caching configurations to change in response to the large amount of traffic&period; It seems like a series of caching configuration errors happened&comma; creating the ability to see the store page from the perspective of another user&period; They frequently cite their web caching partner as sharing the blame with Steam&comma; though do not reference who that partner is&comma; which makes it harder to share the blame&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Rest assured though&comma; if you didn&&num;8217&semi;t browse a Steam Store page with your account information or at the checkout within the previously mentioned time frame&comma; then you should be fine&period; Valve are looking into whose accounts were affected and will contact those users for further steps on what to do&period; They will be working with their web caching partner to find out whose accounts have been exposed&period; They do insist that there was not enough information provided to complete a purchase on Steam&comma; so most users should be fine&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p><strong>Source&colon; <a href&equals;"http&colon;&sol;&sol;store&period;steampowered&period;com&sol;news&sol;19852&sol;&quest;snr&equals;1&lowbar;550&lowbar;552&amp&semi;utm&lowbar;source&equals;twitterfeed&amp&semi;utm&lowbar;medium&equals;twitter">Steam News<&sol;a><&sol;strong><&sol;p>&NewLine;