Valve Corporation, developers of much-anticipated game Half Life 2, confirmed on Thursday that rumours of a source code leak were true.
In a posting to Half Life 2 community site Halflife2.net, co-founder of Valve, Gabe Newall explained:
"Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
"Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
"For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
"Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
"At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
"Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targeted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent."
The stolen code, according to the BBC, does not include any of the graphics, or the game levels, but does contain the sound system and physics engine. This is not sufficient to play the game, but would allow serious hackers to modify the game when it is being played on-line – in other words, to cheat.
It may also allow other developers to understand how Half Life 2 operates – information that may be useful in the development of other games. As Gabe remarked, "Well, this sucks".
The on-line gaming community is furious because the launch date of the game – expected to be Christmas – has now been put back until next year. But gamers do appear to be responding to Newall's request for help in tracking down the hackers.