Leak of source code for Half-Life 2 CONFIRMED

[Gwarsbane]

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.

Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.

Here is what we know:

1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.

2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.

3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.

4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.

5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).

6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.

Well, this sucks.

What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, [email protected]. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.

We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.

Gabe


__________________
Gabe Newell

Ok so who wants to find the person that did this and kill them?

* Gwarsbane raises hand

[Quickening]

That sux...but what does it really matter??

[evil_admin]

From what I understand the source code for HL2, including engine & CS code, which is never released wass stolen and sent out via P2P and other methods. If and when Valve finds out who did this there will be a huge lawsuit I'm sure.

[_Acid_Head_]

Holy shit, this really blows for Valve, five years of code down the shitter...

edit: I would personally kick this person's ass, whoever did it, this just really, really sucks.

[GRITS]

I am sure they feel like they have been violated in the most severe sense of the word...I may dislike they way they have handled things with steam but stealing is stealing and wouldnt wish that on anyone

[Power and Glory]

http://www.devils-children.com/hl2_1.jpg. I got that from the IGN PC forum. I guess TF2 was the secret multiplayer they were hiding. It sucks that this happened. I wonder how something like this got by Valve.

[_Acid_Head_]

They exploited some unknown vulnerabilities through Valve's email servers, and planted what was pretty much an undetectable trojan into their servers. People usually leak these games when they've gone gold, not when they're still in source code, that's pretty much what pisses me off, now competing gaming companies will all get their hands on this precious code, you'll be seeing a lot of games with HL2-quality graphics announced within' the coming months.

[soulsolution]

bleh you cant do much with the code other than make hacks for it..you cant compile it and play the game

[RuNnInG_wIth_ScISsOrS]

The thing that's actually depressing, is that most people don't care. Check out this thread from the steam forums, don't read the first post, I haven't. In case you don't want to vist this filth, here are a few quotes from various threads.

Well, I just read Gabe's actual post, and apparently they'd been hacked previous to the delay. Well, I sort of feel like an ass now. But hey, they could have told us sooner. And why did the code just pop into the public domain now? Anyway, I feel a little sympathy for them, but I'm still sore about the way they hadnled it all. Course that all depends on whether these hackers are at the root of the delay. But I doubt we'll ever know the truth anyway because now it's an easy scapegoat...

Stop using flawed logic, ######. They could have told us sooner?!?!? How long was this code out for, a day? Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that note.

people like you should be shot.

Finally somebody defending Valve. Of course, 5 seconds later he was then trashed by the following messages.

uh, the one who should be shot is the person who leaked it not him, it's not his fault, plus you never had to click this link it was your choice to view the spoilers or not.
some people are in need of education.

You mean, some people are in need of AN education? This is like saying a local cocaine dealer is blameless because he didn't actually grow the coke.

Shoot yourself hypocrite. Why did you read this thread when he clearly posted 'spoiler'?  I'm glad we got some sort of update on TF2 since Valve has shut us out for the past 2 years without any explanation.
Keep it coming good man, keep it coming.

Everyone was praising Valve 5 minutes ago for not pulling a Duke Nukem Forever... These are the people that decide to be the greatest Laker fan ever when they're winning, but as soon as they lose one game. They say some idiocy like, "The Lakers suck now, I can't believe they lost." With much more incorrect grammar and such. This proves the fact that people are stupid.

[_Acid_Head_]

bleh you cant do much with the code

WRONG.

[Gwarsbane]

bleh you cant do much with the code other than make hacks for it..you cant compile it and play the game

Yes you can compile it. If the code snipits I have seen are the real think its done in C++. I could easily find a compiler and then compile it into the game and maybe even take out the stuff that needs steam.


Instead of having to hack threw exes and dlls and know assembly code and stuff like that they can look directly at the code and be able to see exactly how they did something and then make a hack around it.

They can see exactly how the game reads serial numbers and very quickly make a keygen that will make authentic keys.

With the source code, even I (not a very good programmer) could do just about anything.

[_Acid_Head_]

All gaming companies now have access to the HL2 source engine.

Gwars: Haven't they started using C# by now?

[soulsolution]

you cant compile it and play hl2 with it..you can prob make a mod for it and the hackers will all get ahold of it and create hacks but i bet they are update vac right now :>

[Gwarsbane]

I haven't seen any C# code, but I'm gonna guess its close to what C and C++ looks like. C++ is just a more advanced version of C which is what I learned a long time ago (and have mostly forgotten).

C# is pretty new and I can't see Valve or any game company usings that already. Also Steam and Half-Life 2 are both pretty old (source code wise) so thats another reason I don't think the C# is being used. But I could be wrong.

[_Acid_Head_]

Dude, SS, how do you know that? Last I saw HL2 was fully functional in the E3 expo (despite it not going "gold"), maybe the mods aren't complete, but HL2 is, either way, there's enough code there to replicate the source engine.

[RuNnInG_wIth_ScISsOrS]

Just because you can't compile it into the actual game doesn't mean you can't understand the general concept of the code. There are probably plenty of examples in the leaked code on how to do just about anything. Complete morons that have never taken a programming class for C/C++ are writing PAGES worth in the forums on what they've seen in the code. This is 5 YEARS worth of work, they just can't say, "Oops! Somebody's gotten their hands on the code. We'd better start from scratch again."

[soulsolution]

Dude, SS, how do you know that? Last I saw HL2 was fully functional in the E3 expo (despite it not going "gold"), maybe the mods aren't complete, but HL2 is, either way, there's enough code there to replicate the source engine.

uh because there are no sprites\models\animations etc..its just the code

[_Acid_Head_]

They're .bin files if I'm not mistaken, it's not one massive file of HL2 code, and another big file of TF2 code.

[_Acid_Head_]

On the bright side, since this leak is just source code, there is no actual game art or content

Just source, still very useful to anyone with minimal C/C++ knowledge.

[_Acid_Head_]

People saying this comes from a compiled version: http://home.primus.ca/~alexmakas/images/misc/hl2.jpg

Hope it isn't true that they got their hands on textures and models, too.

[Guest]

It was confirmed on a security list that I am on that it was one of IE's 32 unfixed bugs that circumvented the security... gotta love it.:)

[[CAKE]anonymity]

Gamesnet on irc sent a notice to all the users, through status, and said that someone did it, thats how i knew about it, doesnt surprise me that someone tried though.

[kermit]

i think c# is a very high level language (like java)...designed more for the web. it's probably way too slow to make a full-blown fps w/ it on the scale of hl2.

[_Acid_Head_]

C# IS C++, the code is just simplified, and there's some new features that C++ didn't have (just like C relates to C++). The one program I used that was fully written in C# was RunUO, it ran more smoothly than any other program of the same category written in C++. Just like C++, the possibilities with C# are endless. My guess is the same as Gwars, Valve probably didn't have many developers that knew C# well at the start of HL2's development.