Valve bans Game Developer from Steamworks for pointing out a vulnerability

[Artaneius]

And again, what was his alternative? Wait until the inevitable malicious exploit gets on Steam?
By all accounts, Valve was informed months ago, and decided to ignore it.

couldnt he contact more devs to try to make his voice be heard? couldnt he start a campaign to let people know theres a potential exploit, he could even put an ingame message in his game or something

there ARE ways

Dumbest thing I read today. Yes, let's waste time and money starting a campaign to get Valve to listen on fixing an exploit. An indie dev certainly has the time and resources to waste to make a whole campaign to help a company that honestly apparently doesn't give two shits about its users to check into this exploit. Do you honestly understand how dumb this sounds? Valve should spend their money and resources to investigate, not the other way around.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

They didn't ban him for "pointing out a vulnerability", they banned him for hacking the motherfucking system.

While true, it's still counterproductive. This guy had no malicious intent from what it looks like. Hope in this year of his suspension they contact him and work with him to resolve the vulnerability, at least, if the ban doesn't get reversed.

It's like disabling a house's alarm system and vandalizing it "just" to show the owner that you and possibly someone else could. I guess I'll go get a better alarm then but it's still illegal and you're still going down.

You ever see "It Takes A Thief"? Those guys tore up houses to show people just how vulnerable their places were. This is the same scenario, except that he told them repeatedly about it, they did nothing then did something innocuous to prove that there was a fault before it could actually be taken advantage of. No one asked him to do this he did it to it wouldn't get out of hand. The guy doesn't deserve to be banned, he should be commended for finding it before it got out of hand and word spread of the fault to those with less altruistic natures.

Ends and means: don't attack me because it's gonna make me stronger.

This isn't a game this is Valve. These are the people that run STEAM. That service is a lifeline for some people and pointing out a major vulnerability is something that a lot of those people and Valve themselves should be looking for intently.

For the thousandth time I GET that Valve should've taken a hint from the guy, yes, they totally should've done that, the silly bastards. But it still doesn't justify hacking them to prove a point.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

Misleading title *grumbles*

He did what was necessary to highlight this issue and get it fixed, protecting every single Steam user on the planet in the process.

Valve should reconsider this.

 

[Bat Vader]

I feel that since he was punished for doing this that the people at Valve who decided to ignore all the messages they received about it should be punished as well. Perhaps if they had listened the first time this unfortunate incident would have never happened.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

And again, what was his alternative? Wait until the inevitable malicious exploit gets on Steam?
By all accounts, Valve was informed months ago, and decided to ignore it.

couldnt he contact more devs to try to make his voice be heard? couldnt he start a campaign to let people know theres a potential exploit, he could even put an ingame message in his game or something

there ARE ways

Dumbest thing I read today. Yes, let's waste time and money starting a campaign to get Valve to listen on fixing an exploit. An indie dev certainly has the time and resources to waste to make a whole campaign to help a company that honestly apparently doesn't give two shits about its users to check into this exploit. Do you honestly understand how dumb this sounds? Valve should spend their money and resources to investigate, not the other way around.

lets contact kotaku and talk about this posible vulnerability steam has

or lets use our resonably popular game to raise public awareness

or lets try and get in contact with other prominent game devs and attract valve's attention


nope, lets break the steam subscriber agreement we signed and get ourselves banned for a year


who said valve doesnt spend money investigating and solving vulnerabilites on their client? how does this exploit prove valve doesnt?


bottom line, this guy broke the rules, it was good a good cause sure, and valve certainlymade a mistake by failing to listen in the first place, but he did not abide by the legal document he signed, he shouldve been aware of the consequences of this and honestly, has no right to complain because he didnt even exhaust other options


imagine for a second that every time an exploit was found people would simply use it to troll and be obnoxious, harmless? sure, but anoying as hell as well and certainly something valve doesnt wants

 

[Caiphus]

For the thousandth time I GET that Valve should've taken a hint from the guy, yes, they totally should've done that, the silly bastards. But it still doesn't justify hacking them to prove a point.

I think it's excusable. That's my opinion, and is worth about as much as yours, but there we go.

I think the only real thing that the dev could be criticised for is making the vulnerability public. Now people know about it. On the upside, Valve has to fix it because everyone knows about it, but it could still be dangerous. And breaching his contract, of course, but that's a legal problem and not necessarily a moral one.

To me, it seems like a situation where you live in an apartment. You figure out that the smoke alarms are faulty. You write to the landlord asking him to fix the smoke alarms before someone gets hurt. He responds multiple times saying "smoke alarms aren't important, we trust people not to set fires."[footnote]Since I believe Valve's response to the dev's emails was "We trust our devs not to exploit vulnerabilities". Which, he then did, I guess, albeit in a pretty harmless way[/footnote] You then send him a video[footnote]Maybe you put the video up on facebook if we want to include the fact that the dev went public with the vulnerability.[/footnote] of you lighting a cigarette under a smoke alarm, showing that it doesn't go off. The landlord then evicts you due to his strict no-smoking policy.

Doesn't quite seem fair. Seems totally legal, since that's the contract that he signed. Still seems like a dick move.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

For the thousandth time I GET that Valve should've taken a hint from the guy, yes, they totally should've done that, the silly bastards. But it still doesn't justify hacking them to prove a point.

I think it's excusable. That's my opinion, and is worth about as much as yours, but there we go.

Well I don't follow this warped sense of entitlement at all. Valve is a fool for not heeding the friendly warning, but the hacker is an idiot for bringing his own prophetic admonition to fruition. "I told you so" is not a legal or moral defense.

 

[Caiphus]

Well I don't follow this warped sense of entitlement at all. Valve is a fool for not heeding the friendly warning, but the hacker is an idiot for bringing his own prophetic admonition to fruition. "I told you so" is not a legal or moral defense.

Well, it certainly isn't a legal defence, you're right. "But, Your Honour, the plaintiff is a big meanie" never got anyone anywhere.

In this case I think that he has a moral defense. Not a spectacular one. He's essentially performed a white-hat hacker service for Valve, albeit in a cynical, public way.

And besides. It's not like he actually used the vulnerability to send out keyloggers or whatever, which is what he was concerned with. That would be "I told you so", and then would have been totally wrong.

 

[Timmaaaah]

Perhaps he got banned because revealing that something is vulnerable would allow hackers to exploit that vulnerability? Was his post or whatever removed? I know if I had somebody announcing the ways in which my home could be broken into I wouldn't want them around either. If they just pointed it out to me so I could fix the problem then it'd be good.
He decided to react badly by exploiting the weakness instead of helping out.

 

[Timmaaaah]

Perhaps he got banned because revealing that something is vulnerable would allow hackers to exploit that vulnerability? Was his post or whatever removed? I know if I had somebody announcing the ways in which my home could be broken into I wouldn't want them around either. If they just pointed it out to me so I could fix the problem then it'd be good.
He decided to react badly by exploiting the weakness instead of helping out. Kind of like the Die Hard 4 villain...

 

[Hyenatempest]

Just so you know kangaroo, the "steam subscriber agreement" isn't the word of god. common mistake. You keep saying he should "exhaust other options" but exactly how much responsibility is he supposed to take on his shoulder? How far is he supposed to go? Where does valve actually start being responsible instead of him? When it's too late and good chunk of the users have key loggers on their pc's and everybody's account info is compromised? That's all before getting into what a time sensitive issue that is. if there is a vulnerability that can be exploited that needs IMMEDIATE attention, anybody remember the ubisoft sql injection or target being compromised?

I keep hearing that he violated some agreement of some sort but I ask if he actually did. From what I am hearing he basically posted a link to a video in an update. So he didn't "hack" anything from the sounds of it, he only pointed out that somebody could have used the exploit to run malicious code, malicious code that apparently bypasses UAC.

This is all not to mention that they were well aware of the issue and had been for several months. At some point valve needs to take responsibility to protect their customers, and it was long before this ever happened. If unquestionably following a strict set of rules is the closes thing you have to a moral compass, then I highly recommend joining your local church.

 

[AuronFtw]

And again, what was his alternative? Wait until the inevitable malicious exploit gets on Steam?
By all accounts, Valve was informed months ago, and decided to ignore it.

couldnt he contact more devs to try to make his voice be heard? couldnt he start a campaign to let people know theres a potential exploit, he could even put an ingame message in his game or something

there ARE ways

All of my this. You know what adria richards did that pissed everyone off a few years ago? Tweeted a picture of people to blow perceived misbehavior out of proportion by stirring up her media backing into a frenzy? This guy could have easily done the same. Drop lines to kotaku, drop lines to RPS, spread the word that hey, I found a potential dangerous exploit in steam and valve isn't doing shit to fix it. People got on adria richards' case (rightfully so, imo, but that's a totally different discussion) for making a private issue public and attempting to shame people instead of going through the proper channels, but that's precisely what this developer could have done in this case. It's the logical "next step" if you're somehow so bothered by Valve's inaction that you want to stir up drama over it.

Actually putting forth code to "prove a point" is the step after that - where you've decided fuck it, I no longer care about the consequences, Valve needs to fix their shit and I'm going to prove why. You know you're breaking the rules, you know you're violating Valve's trust, but your anger over the issue is too great to care anymore. It's completely logical that he got banned for a year, especially because he skipped step 2 and went right for the jugular. He knew it would happen (and if he didn't, he was retarded).

That said, if he *really* wanted to be a ****, he could have simply kept records of his complaints with Steam and then waited for an actual attack to come. Once some shady company actually does inject some malicious shit and trojan all over people's computers, he could whip out his records and say "well would you look at that, it's almost like I brought this up before!" He could even potentially take Valve to court over it, citing damages via consumers of their games being infected by it. And if he waited and the exploit got fixed before any harmful injection, then he can sleep better at night knowing he brought it up and they fixed it. Everybody wins.

The developer did some really retarded shit here, can't even deny it. Valve's reaction is no less than expected.

 

[AuronFtw]

Just so you know kangaroo, the "steam subscriber agreement" isn't the word of god. common mistake. You keep saying he should "exhaust other options" but exactly how much responsibility is he supposed to take on his shoulder?

Uh, reporting it via in-house functions. Telling Valve there is a problem that needs fixing is exactly how much responsibility he is supposed to take on his shoulder - no more, no less.

How far is he supposed to go?

Still that far. Report the issue and let it go. He doesn't work at Valve - his job is done with the reporting.

Where does valve actually start being responsible instead of him?

The minute he reports the issue and they read it.

When it's too late and good chunk of the users have key loggers on their pc's and everybody's account info is compromised?

Yes, Valve is most certainly responsible for it by this point. Not the developer, not the developer's mother, not the developer's cat or best friend or posse. Valve is solely responsible for potential security leaks in their services.

I keep hearing that he violated some agreement of some sort but I ask if he actually did. From what I am hearing he basically posted a link to a video in an update.

It's more about the trust. Valve trusts developers not to abuse the tools at their disposal. Sometimes it backfires, like when those horror stories jim sterling goes on about come up - developers deleting forum posts and sometimes entire forums to hide disparaging remarks, etc. But those instances are rare, most developers seem to be more level headed. When someone is trusted not to abuse the tools they're given, and then they do (regardless of reason), it's a violation of trust. His goal was noble, but he did something he wasn't supposed to do. The bank metaphor earlier was apt - breaking into a bank to prove there's a vulnerability will still get you arrested, even if you don't take anything and have no desire to do so.

This is all not to mention that they were well aware of the issue and had been for several months.

Yes, we've all established that the ball was in Valve's court. If anything serious had happened (spoiler; it didn't) it would be 100% on Valve for not fixing it in time. That's not even an issue, nobody's even arguing that point.

At some point valve needs to take responsibility to protect their customers, and it was long before this ever happened.

I'm sorry the company famous for delaying game releases, game updates and Half Life 3 doesn't put out behind-the-scenes steamworks updates on your schedule. I'm sure if you wrote a letter to gaben he would apologize to you directly.

If unquestionably following a strict set of rules is the closes thing you have to a moral compass, then I highly recommend joining your local church.

Ah, ad hominem to finish off a mostly pointless whine post. Class.

 

[Hyenatempest]

"I'm sorry the company famous for delaying game releases, game updates and Half Life 3 doesn't put out behind-the-scenes steamworks updates on your schedule. I'm sure if you wrote a letter to gaben he would apologize to you directly." Funny you say I made an ad hominem right after making a straw man. Games releases have nothing to do with security, which was what that part my post was (obviously) about. There's no excuse to letting a security risk go unchecked for extended periods of time. Valve being "famous" for delaying games should not mean they are excused from protecting their customers.

"Yes, we've all established that the ball was in Valve's court. If anything serious had happened (spoiler; it didn't) it would be 100% on Valve for not fixing it in time. That's not even an issue, nobody's even arguing that point." Nobody is arguing this point because it's stupid that they didn't fix it sooner. You can say nothing happened all you want but it's largely proving my point, he forced them to fix a security risk with an example, an example that didn't hurt anybody might I add. His actions may have stopped something far worse from happening, all without causing any damages. You can say it's "based on trust", but that's just plain stupid. Even if a dev didn't want to do something harmful, they could easily have their accounts compromised (like...I dunno, heartbleed for example) and have a third party use their credentials to log in and inject malicious code.

"His goal was noble, but he did something he wasn't supposed to do" Yea That's the logic that has Nelson Mandela branded as a terrorist in America.

"The bank metaphor earlier was apt..." I'm not breaking this down into a metaphor, robbing a bank is nothing like posting a video with javascript and breaking the law is nothing like a terms of service agreement. Stop arguing fictional scenarios and focus the real ones.

 

[Bat Vader]

And again, what was his alternative? Wait until the inevitable malicious exploit gets on Steam?
By all accounts, Valve was informed months ago, and decided to ignore it.

couldnt he contact more devs to try to make his voice be heard? couldnt he start a campaign to let people know theres a potential exploit, he could even put an ingame message in his game or something

there ARE ways

All of my this. You know what adria richards did that pissed everyone off a few years ago? Tweeted a picture of people to blow perceived misbehavior out of proportion by stirring up her media backing into a frenzy? This guy could have easily done the same. Drop lines to kotaku, drop lines to RPS, spread the word that hey, I found a potential dangerous exploit in steam and valve isn't doing shit to fix it. People got on adria richards' case (rightfully so, imo, but that's a totally different discussion) for making a private issue public and attempting to shame people instead of going through the proper channels, but that's precisely what this developer could have done in this case. It's the logical "next step" if you're somehow so bothered by Valve's inaction that you want to stir up drama over it.

Actually putting forth code to "prove a point" is the step after that - where you've decided fuck it, I no longer care about the consequences, Valve needs to fix their shit and I'm going to prove why. You know you're breaking the rules, you know you're violating Valve's trust, but your anger over the issue is too great to care anymore. It's completely logical that he got banned for a year, especially because he skipped step 2 and went right for the jugular. He knew it would happen (and if he didn't, he was retarded).

That said, if he *really* wanted to be a ****, he could have simply kept records of his complaints with Steam and then waited for an actual attack to come. Once some shady company actually does inject some malicious shit and trojan all over people's computers, he could whip out his records and say "well would you look at that, it's almost like I brought this up before!" He could even potentially take Valve to court over it, citing damages via consumers of their games being infected by it. And if he waited and the exploit got fixed before any harmful injection, then he can sleep better at night knowing he brought it up and they fixed it. Everybody wins.

The developer did some really retarded shit here, can't even deny it. Valve's reaction is no less than expected.

I agree that what the developer did was stupid and(the punishment is fine)but Valve ignoring all the warnings they got is just as equally if not more stupid. If I was the developer and saw that my first few warnings didn't result in a fix I would have gone to every gaming journalism site I know and tell them about it.

I have lost a lot of the respect I had for Valve because of this. This is something I would expect UbiSoft or EA to pull. The fact that Valve did it is what makes it so much worse.

 

[The Wykydtron]

Remember when Steam was heralded as the "saviour of PC gaming?" Yeah me neither. Valve has used up all of their goodwill over the last two year as far as i'm concerned.

Two Years? They've been like this for the longest time, hell they're responsible for almost every anti-consumer precadent in gaming. They were just good at PR.

Ah hell, i'm relatively new to this whole PC gaming thing, I thought they were still decent for awhile. I only started seriously just over a year ago, before then Steam was just window dressing for Team Fortress 2. My first real experience of how broken it is was when my one friend had his account frozen cuz of Paypal problems, y'know you use too much money in one transfer so banks and similar just have to stick their head in. A problem that Paypal itself had sorted out a week or so after the incident, meanwhile his Steam account that he had the same Paypal connected to it was frozen for roundabout 3/4 months investigating (and I use that word in the loosest possible way) the same problem and he had to go through the hell of ringing up the Steam complaints/support line several times.

Did I mention illegal in the UK yet? I don't understand how anyone can attempt to defend Steam when that's a clear fact (Sale of Goods Act 1994, give it a quick runover if you're that bored) Cuz Steam's customer support and refund policy is just that god awful. I can't stress this enough, their way of running customer service is illegal. "Nah man" they still say, "Valve is perfectly fine, saviour of PC gaming" Valve doesn't listen to petty things like "laws" though right? Hell they can't even listen to their own customers. They've got more hats to design.

ok

valve violates the law, and its bad

this guy violates a contract, and is good

Oh i've gone on a tangent, sorry i'm not really talking about the guy anymore. Though yeah Valve brazenly violating UK and EU laws does likely qualify as bad, you've got that part right.

Trust me, the law they're breaking is also technically contract law so they're both at roundabout the same fault if you're going for the type of law argument. Fun fact, y'know how some companies love to stick a "you cannot sue us ever when you take this contract lolololol" clause in there? In the UK that gets laughed out of court within 2 seconds and stricken off immediately. UK and EU laws are brilliant when it comes to customers vs businesses.

Valve is just abusing the fact that they have the best lawyers around and chasing them around would cost far too much money. I'm not even calling the guy "good" to be honest, the guy should have expected that ban since y'know hacking something is bad regardless of anything, I just find the way he highlighted the problem fucking hilarious.

 

[VoidWanderer]

Well that means he hacked their system so to speak... there are some clear rules on that subject.
I'll agree that Valve need to listen up and sort their stuff when a problem arises, but that still doesn't permit one to break other peoples shit to make a point.

I can see his logic. I mean, if a bank had your money and you found a glaring security flaw and the bank ignored you, wouldn't you force the issue upon them by staging an 'attack' to get their attention?

I think Valve pulled a dick-move banning him for a year, but he had to get his point across somehow before someone with malicious intent exploited it.

 

[DoPo]

The examples above are still removed from his actions and exaggerated like yours in the sense that they compare Duda to criminals.

So a guy walking around with picklocks is a criminal now, even if they haven't broken into anything? But the dev actually exploiting a vulnerability is not doing anything illegal...by illegally exploiting a vulnerability. I can see where this is going. You intend to keep applying double-think, so I'll just leave you with that, O'Brien.

 

[mitchell271]

Well that means he hacked their system so to speak... there are some clear rules on that subject.
I'll agree that Valve need to listen up and sort their stuff when a problem arises, but that still doesn't permit one to break other peoples shit to make a point.

While yes, that's true, being a white-hat should be the main caveat to this. He tried to tell Valve's Steam division and they just ignored him or didn't get the warning, so he showed them the vulnerability. They reacted very poorly, basically saying, "You told us about this mistake, but we don't like feeling bad about our mistakes so you're not allowed to play anymore!"

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

Remember when Steam was heralded as the "saviour of PC gaming?" Yeah me neither. Valve has used up all of their goodwill over the last two year as far as i'm concerned.

Two Years? They've been like this for the longest time, hell they're responsible for almost every anti-consumer precadent in gaming. They were just good at PR.

Ah hell, i'm relatively new to this whole PC gaming thing, I thought they were still decent for awhile. I only started seriously just over a year ago, before then Steam was just window dressing for Team Fortress 2. My first real experience of how broken it is was when my one friend had his account frozen cuz of Paypal problems, y'know you use too much money in one transfer so banks and similar just have to stick their head in. A problem that Paypal itself had sorted out a week or so after the incident, meanwhile his Steam account that he had the same Paypal connected to it was frozen for roundabout 3/4 months investigating (and I use that word in the loosest possible way) the same problem and he had to go through the hell of ringing up the Steam complaints/support line several times.

Did I mention illegal in the UK yet? I don't understand how anyone can attempt to defend Steam when that's a clear fact (Sale of Goods Act 1994, give it a quick runover if you're that bored) Cuz Steam's customer support and refund policy is just that god awful. I can't stress this enough, their way of running customer service is illegal. "Nah man" they still say, "Valve is perfectly fine, saviour of PC gaming" Valve doesn't listen to petty things like "laws" though right? Hell they can't even listen to their own customers. They've got more hats to design.

ok

valve violates the law, and its bad

this guy violates a contract, and is good

Oh i've gone on a tangent, sorry i'm not really talking about the guy anymore. Though yeah Valve brazenly violating UK and EU laws does likely qualify as bad, you've got that part right.

Trust me, the law they're breaking is also technically contract law so they're both at roundabout the same fault if you're going for the type of law argument. Fun fact, y'know how some companies love to stick a "you cannot sue us ever when you take this contract lolololol" clause in there? In the UK that gets laughed out of court within 2 seconds and stricken off immediately. UK and EU laws are brilliant when it comes to customers vs businesses.

Valve is just abusing the fact that they have the best lawyers around and chasing them around would cost far too much money. I'm not even calling the guy "good" to be honest, the guy should have expected that ban since y'know hacking something is bad regardless of anything, I just find the way he highlighted the problem fucking hilarious.

well its certainly bad if they are truthly breaking the law, remember the deal with liscenses is a bit iffy, refund can sometimes be denied

plus if they were breaking the law all this time why wasnt valve sued back when steam wasnt such a big deal?

i think im missing something, but yeah this issue is better left for another thread