British newspaper article sheds new light on gaming"s most notorious code heist.
When Valve announced last month that a wave of international arrests had been made in the Half-Life 2 code theft, they directed questions to the FBI"s Cybercrime Task Force. Task Force officers would only confirm arrests had been made but would not comment beyond that.
Luckily, the FBI"s European counterparts are apparently more forthcoming. An article in yesterday"s London Guardian outlined the Half-Life 2 code-theft arrests in the most detail to date. Besides talking about how the gaming community helped track down the perpetrators via online group-sleuthing, the article revealed several new details, including:
How the theft was perpetrated: According to the Guardian, "Having accessed Valve"s server through a security-bypassing loophole in Windows, the hackers were able to download an early and hugely incomplete version of Half-Life 2 and posted it on the Internet for downloading via Usenet. A boxed version of the code was even on sale on the Ukrainian and Russian black markets."