Steam's Forums, the scene of a Nov. 6 defacement attack that exposed a database containing customers' private information, came back online a few hours ago. The most current topic in the general discussion forum is "So, We Getting Free Copies of Portal 2?" The answer to that is probably no.
While the scope of the Steam Hack remains to be seen, for millions of gamers its early developments—indeed, even Valve's early statements—match those of this spring's notorious PlayStation Network outage, which may provide a guidepost for what is to come.
A message sent just now from Valve Corporation head Gabe Newell says credit card numbers and other personal information were inside a database compromised during a defacement attack on the Steam forums this Sunday.
], [http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--vWaEvvzT--/c_fill,g_north,h_358,w_636/18j16ri8sxlsmjpg.jpg, (small)], [http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--KMWItbEF--/c_fill,g_north,h_180,w_320/18j16ri8sxlsmjpg.jpg, (medium)], [http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--4Mar_LAF--/c_fill,fl_progressive,g_north,h_77,q_80,w_137/18j16ri8sxlsmjpg.jpg, (large)])
Today Valve told us that their cloud-based Steam service has been compromised, and that users' personal information and credit card information could be at risk.
