Une nouvelle plutôt louche fait en ce moment le tour du web. Ça se lit sur Slashdot, Blue's News, Shack News, Gamers With Babies, Vossey, Half-Life Fusion et j'en passe beaucoup d'autres. Je tiens à remercier le channel IRC de NoFrag pour l'info ainsi que Cyr1c de chez Half-Life Fusion pour son courriel. ;)

Apparemment, une partie du code source de Half-Life² aurait été volée à Valve via une faille de sécurité de la messagerie de Gabe Newell. Le fichier ne contiendrait cependant qu'une partie fractionnaire de la source puisqu'on sait que le jeu prendra plusieurs CDs, et que le fichier ne fait que 730 Mo environ. C'est plutôt louche, mais malgré tout, la plupart des sites semblent prendre la nouvelle très au sérieux... Voyons voir ce qu'en dit Gabe Newell sur les forums de Half-Life2.net.

Mise à jour : Histoire de retirer tout doute dans mes propos, sachez que cette info s'avère véridique. Par contre, n'allez pas le télécharger, ça sert vraiment à rien. Aussi, merci de ne pas mettre de lien pour le télécharger ici, c'est tout à fait illégal.

Le message de Gabe :

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, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. 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