Black Raven Dragoons

[Grimblast]

For those of you that use Steam, Ben and Matt both let me know that apparently Steam was hacked. Ben sent me this article which better explains what happened. At least Steam didn't wait as long as Sony did to report something had happened. Plus, it looks like Steam used proper security measures for their stored data unlike Sony which stored their passwords and vital customer info in less secure ways. I do recommend watching your bank account activity for awhile in case any suspicious activity happens but if what they mention in that article is true, you may not really have to worry much, if at all. A good practice though is to change your Steam account password just in case and just keep an eye on whatever credit card you used for any unknown expenditures.

[Zancarius]

As a follow-up, someone posted this screencap of an e-mail from Gabe Newell who stated that all card information is encrypted using AES256; while AES256 does have some known attacks, the cipher is secure, and assuming the e-mail is indeed valid even a best case attack would still require 8.5x10^37 operations to complete. That's about one magnitude fewer than the number of available (albeit not used) IPs in IPv6. If you converted each operation to a mile, you could travel back and forth between here and the Andromeda galaxy about 348,000,000,000,000,000,000 times.

Also, it should be noted that the attackers will likely never see the credit card information in their lifetimes (or their children's lifetimes or their children's children or...) barring 1) any private keys used to decrypt the information are still secure and 2) there's not some unexpected advancement in quantum computing that greatly reduces the efficacy of the AES cipher.

TL;DR Steam hasn't yet pulled a Sony.