Check this out. Somebody hacked Valve and then stole the engine and Source Code for HL2.

<a href="http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=10692&perpage=15&pagenumbe r=1" target="_blank">
Valve Software
</a>

It's at their forums, here's what Valve's Managing Director had to say about it:
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Gabe Newell
Managing Director
Valve Software


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
__________________
Gabe Newell

Isn`t something similar happend to Doom III? [img]graemlins/1ponder.gif[/img]

WOW... that is a HUGE FUBAR. You'd think a game company that's been fighting people hacking their games for online advantage for years would be more careful. As a programmer I'd love to get a look at their code [img]smile.gif[/img] , but I feel for the HL2 team, I think I'd be crying if I was in their shoes.

In the long run I don't think it hurts them too much (it's far enough pre-release that I'm sure the game executable will be quite different), although they'll need to keep their eyes peeled for other companies stealing their code and using it in their own games. I expect they'll change some key code segments to make the loose code unusable by hackers trying to cheat at online games.

That's bad and pathetic at the same time.. :( A great game like HL2 got raped like that, by some idiot who wanted the source code. How pathetic can you be? Is it the kick of hacking into someone else's computer, or because you want the source code that much? Be original, and write your own source code! :mad:

Karma. What goes around, comes around. They'll get theirs.

Unfortunately, that doesn't happen all the time... :( I do hope they get caught, and judging from Gabe Newell's post he has summoned the entire Half-Life scene to aid him in his quest, so maybe they *will* succeed...

Unfortunately, that doesn't happen all the time... :( I do hope they get caught, and judging from Gabe Newell's post he has summoned the entire Half-Life scene to aid him in his quest, so maybe they *will* succeed... </font>[/QUOTE]I pretty much agree with you Link! But I think that the chances are pretty much equal to zero in this case...

You never know!


GO HALF LIFE SOCIETY!!! [img]graemlins/thewave.gif[/img] :

Unfortunately, that doesn't happen all the time... :( I do hope they get caught, and judging from Gabe Newell's post he has summoned the entire Half-Life scene to aid him in his quest, so maybe they *will* succeed... </font>[/QUOTE]Well, because I have a non-stream perspective, I actually meant: if not in this life then another. The universe IMO never forgets and neither does your soul. It will feel everything that it has done and done to others. Thus, THEY WILL get theirs.

They've been working on this for years. The graphical engine and the A.I are revolutionary. What do you think the code is worth?

I'd say 50.000 dollars. But I could be wrong though :D All in all this is just really awful... :( Did you guys screenshots, movies? Awsome stuff!!

I'd say 50.000 dollars. But I could be wrong though :D All in all this is just really awful... :( Did you guys screenshots, movies? Awsome stuff!! </font>[/QUOTE]I did saw that movie...30 mins IIRC

That really really sucks for them I hope they get the people that did it.

The code is worth minimum 7 figures and probably more. Some of the things I saw in the HL2 demo I've never seen anywhere else... millions easy... tens possibly.

Millions easy? I'm not so sure about that... But wat you say about being revolutionary, I second that wholeheartedly. That (indeed, Xen it lasted for like 30 minutes) movie I saw was full of material that made my jaw drop. And when I finally closed my mouth again, it just dropped open again just because I thought about what I saw [img]smile.gif[/img]

think about it this way... a team of programmers has been working on that code for years... there's bound to be lots of tips and tricks that has helped differentiate HL from the other engines out there. I think just looking at the potential advantage it could give a software house trying to break into the 3d FPS market... millions easy.

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Heh, you go Xen!! :D

He! Show me the movie, I wanna see the good stuff!

And if I knew the entire half-life scene was after me I'd be cracking my panties right now!
</font>

[ 10-04-2003, 04:45 AM: Message edited by: Zuvio ]

For a Engine like that? heck, it could go for $500,000 easy.. Just to buy the RIGHTS to license it costs hundreds of thousands.

What I gotta ask is WHY THE HELL did they have the source code open to a network that is connected to the internet?!?! Same goes for the DOD and FBI. Why the hell do they do this?! Crazy... Smells like an internal job to me.

Hope they get the FBI On this, and catch the perp. Hell, it could be another company that stole it... hmmm.

Interesting choice of words because Karma is the name of the UT2003 Engien which it handed out happily early to let developers go nuts with it [img]tongue.gif[/img]

I am starting to woneder if [img]graemlins/choc.gif[/img] might stolen it... [img]graemlins/1ponder.gif[/img] :D

Maybe it is an insider's job... but certainly not one of the key personnels. For the time and effort Valve put into this new engine, they could have made the source code a wee bit secure than this.

Nevertheless, they have learnt thier lesson and any future attempt would not be so easy anymore.

From Bluesnews.com:


More on Half-Life 2 Source [October 04, 2003, 3:29 PM EDT] - 4 Comments
Game Biz Mystified by Code Theft (thanks Mike Martinez) and Half-Life 2 code leaked online (thanks Thor) have a mainstream reports on the Half-Life 2 code situation. Meanwhile, Shacknews has more on the situation form Valve's Gabe Newell:

1) We've taken our network connection down to pretty much a minimum. We're still finding machines internally that have been compromised.

2) The suite of tools that the attacker was using included the modified version of RemotelyAnywhere (basically a Remote Desktop-style remote admin tool), Haxker Defender (a process, registry key and file hiding tool), the key logger, and various networking utilities that allowed them to transfer files (compressors, NetCat, and FTP). We also are pretty sure they were sniffing our network to gather passwords and other information. Haxker Defender includes a file system driver that allows an attacker to have stuff on your machine that is invisible, unless you do something like mount the drive under another OS that has NTFS support.

We have determined one way of detecting some infected machines, which is using a connection viewer to detect connections to anomalous hosts external to our network.

We still don't know their entry method.

3) In general, the community has been remarkably swift at tracking down the sources of the leak. What would be most helpful now are IP addresses of the people who were responsible for the intrusion or for the denial of service attacks.

4) Also, please continue to send in URLs of websites hosting the source code. We've been contacting people and asking them to take it down.

5) There's anecdotal evidence that other game developers have been targeted by whoever attacked us. This hasn't been confirmed. We've been providing other game developers with more detailed information about the exploits and evidence of infiltration.

6) We're running a little bit blind with our network shut down, but it seems like some of the press has picked up the story. I've been fielding calls from the mainstream non-games, non-technical press.all day. Hopefully they will get to report shortly what a mistake it is to piss off a whole bunch of gamers and get them hunting you around the Internet.

For any information related to this, please send it to helpvalve@valvesoftware.com, or you can always send to gaben@valvesoftware.com as well.

Yeah I know what you mean! Even the small company that I worked for in the summer had seperate web PC's that weren't connected to the local Intranet and the local Intranet was in no way connected to the Internet.