

Screenshots posted by MaddoxX reveal the extent of the breach


  • Screenshots of internal Valve web pages
  • A portion of Valve's Cafe directory
  • Error logs
  • Credit card information of customers
  • Financial information on Valve



MaddoxX does make one thing quite clear in his electronic manifesto:


Comments     Threshold


RE: Yup, I knew it.
By Justin Case on 4/19/2007 2:25:57 PM , Rating: 5
I don't know what planet you live on, but I can tell you that, on this one, several banks run their entire backbone on... Windows. I'm not saying it's an efficient way to do things (for starters, it's more expensive than the alternatives), but it is perfectly possible to have secure Windows-based systems (I'm talking NT / 2000 / Server, not XP Home or any of that crap, of course).

A properly configured web server won't let hackers in in the first place, and careful configuration of your firewall, users, NTFS permissions, and internal network permissions can do the rest (in other words, the same things a sane and competent admin would to in a Unix system). Server 2003's defaults are even pretty civilized (as long as you add a good firewall and get rid of IIS).

Obviously if you run a vanilla install of Apache (or, god forbid, IIS) and upload-enabled PHP on an administrator account on a FAT volume, on a LAN with file sharing enabled, without a (real) firewall, you're asking for trouble.

NTFS gives, if anything, a lot more control over file permissions than the most common *nix filesystems. 99.9% of people don't have a clue about NTFS or user permissions but then, 99.9% of people aren't server admins.

It's not the OS that makes a system secure, it's the admin. On a properly configured system, external attackers (or clients in general) shouldn't even be able to figure out the server's OS.

P.S. - Remember Valve was founded by ex-Microsoft guys, so I guess having 100% secure systems would go against their nature. ;-)

RE: Yup, I knew it.
By Neosis on 4/19/2007 8:37:30 PM , Rating: 2

".. most comman *nix filesystems .." I presume you mean ext3 and ReiserFS. You are right about these two, NTFS enables more advanced file permission settings than POSIX, however these are not commonly used in servers by experienced system admins. One of the important reason is the poor scalability for ext3. (maybe with htrees, it's ok)

For security features and scalability, NSS has many advantages over NTFS, though recently NTFS gained similar features like Access Based Enumeration. It is similar to visibiliy in NSS. No suprise if we think NTFS is a derivative of the Novell NetWare 2.x ACL mode.

Here you can see its features:

RE: Yup, I knew it.

