I posted this on the /r/halflife Discord, got as vitriolic a response as what I was anticipating since they're rather challenging to communicate with.
tl;dr: - I'm a games journalist and work for a very popular website - We were contacted by an individual claiming to have accessed Valve's network and provided images in an effort to prove to us he legitimately breached their security - Get contacted by Valve about the individual, company signs nda to work with Valve, receive payment, and have direct monitoring and communication with them about this -Valve under full damage control and has been on a lock down trying to find the person, my Reddit account mysteriously gets deleted and I receive strange phonecalls and texts on one of my secondary phones - Leaker stated yesterday morning that he is going to let loose everything he has obtained very soon
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Sorry for the absence past few days. A lot is going on with work. Last week our company and employees' emails as well as friends from other companies, blogs, websites, youtube channels, received mail claiming they compromised and accessed Valve's private registry. We get trolled pretty regularly but this individual provided fresh images throughout the days afterwards and further provided more that proved that he did in fact access their source. All of us (companies, blogs, websites, etc etc) received word from Valve about this, do what we can to find this individual, not publish the content that they sent us, told us they're doing everything they are going to do to find this person.
I'd also like to reiterate before I go further that Valve has not and will not be showing any of us anything this summer and this coming week. If they are to reveal any new content or projects, they're doing it on their own free whim with no one else included.
So I hopped on /r/halflife and the various fan forums, and Sup Forums and neogaf to see if anyone else has caught word about this or heard about it and the only thing I could find or see that could have possibly related to this was PelPix's leak of the older Half-Life content. Everything seemed so crystal clear and made sense at that moment that they were the individual Valve and we were in contact with. For a few days I was compelled to speak to whoever I could within this community, particularly @Jackathan about the individual and the files not for an ulterior purpose of contacting and blackmailing to Valve but for our own purposes as to find the individual and work with them to distribute more content on a larger scale for everyone's benefit -- particularly our own.
Ian Hall
We receive word from Valve where they address and source PerlPix themselves and what they 'leaked'. That PerlPix is not who they're looking for, and couldn't care less about the content they have distributed or if we even publish content relating to them. They expressed that PerlPix may be involved with the individual who contacted us, but the chances of this are very low, and to give word to them if/when the other individual contacts us or what have you. Should probably mention this is heavily NDA'd out and that we've signed legal obligations stating that discussing this, publishing content, the whole nine yards everything is going to fuck us up if we don't comply with them, plus they're paying us to assist in the cause which I should mention isn't unknown in these practices with larger publishers. And again, far as I can tell, I'm the only one JUST giving word about this to the public; case in point this is some heavy duty serious shit that's going on with countless individuals and websites that you guys probably go on daily.
But just when you think you have the cards on the table you have to throw them all away. We worked tirelessly to find all the info we could on PerlPix too so that was a lost cause completely.
Gabriel Miller
We've received word yesterday at about 5:07 am PST from the leaker who contacted us, saying they're going to leak everything to the first person that wires them $10,000. My company decided not to comply. Some of my friends' work places are seriously contemplating working together with them to distribute this content which sounds shady as fuck but if you look at the bigger picture it can make a lot of sense, particularly with views and revenue and as long as security and communication/money wiring is tight enough then there is nothing to worry about. But the thing is, this guy seems like a loose canon ready to blow at any second and our contact with them has been under scrutiny by Valve with them having the right to see everything, having us given up much of our own privacy aside from what was already lacking from surveillance software on our computers.
I'll describe the images best I can and again and as with anything I talk about in these parts or address, you are more than free to take it with a grain of salt or to not believe me. But I wouldn't go out of my way to have done this if there wasn't enough there that was tangible enough to come down to the decision to contact well this fan base in particular which is like the Sentinnel Island of the internet. I'd also like to further legitimize myself by addressing what I claimed to saw and knew about at E3, not sure if it was either here or the gamedetective discord but I can summarize briefly: - Addressed new Sonic game - Addressed new project from creators of Burnout - Addressed seeing Red Dead 3 trailer - Addressed having played Agent 2/3 weeks prior at the time
I'll mention that these aren't exact quotes merely rough summaries - because I can't remember them enough nor can I view them outside of work:
- We received our first email from them, stating that they accessed Valve's network and could possibly distribute material for us. English was a bit all over the place albeit no typos to be found.
Christian Anderson
" Hello, I've breached into Valve Software's network and found x and x and information and files of interest contact me for more I can provide plenty and I'm going to let everything out very soon, etc"
Attached images included:
- file structure with folder names that looked like things along the lines of acronyms and what not, but nothing clearly saying something super obvious if you will. Just things like ' DZT, Fwrs, jumbled letters essentially or numbers.
- massive list of txt files with again similar names
- image taken with an android phone of their computer monitor showing these things alongside a dark vertical window with what I can only describe as programming or something? Stuff like ' _;) -- dsflkds ' or what have you. Doing my best here, by no means am I technical or familiar with any of this.
We are heavily convinced they're a troll and there's nothing to be found. Once Valve contacted us, we had our company's IT and server management take a look at the original images and they couldn't give us any info on any of it; they're just as stumped as we are.
- We received more email from them in the course of the following days. The images again, looked like more folder structures and there were files with the extension of I think idf? And .00# (# for random numbers)
- One of the files was named hell.something They just said that they had lots more coming. This is also when Valve contacted us. We never received anything from Perlpix, nobody I know/work with did. Facepunch exclusive.
Nicholas Green
Later that day/early morning next day sends us more. Bear in mind this is when Valve is involved with us and this individual has no idea Valve knows about them, nobody has responded to them yet. They're just sending this emails and files unsolicited.
- Some of the file names had l2, l3, l4, etc etc for a long while. Does anyone know what these are?
- Folder structure with the name compiler and again jumbled text read entries, something distro 2013 was seen there.
All the images they send are like this. Valve has very little to say about any of it. Essentially "we're taking care of it" and that's it.
- Last image and he stated in the message attached to it "REALLY IMPORTANT!" (hilarious broken english) names found were along the lines of sb2012 sbdatab
I'm going to reevaluate the images again today hopefully to get a more clear analysis for anyone to come up with some ideas as to what they are or something. We don't know what any of it is, we're not game designers.
What made things stranger was last week when I was on Reddit and the day that this individual contacts us my account was completely deleted. Then I started getting strange forms of contact sent to me. But I know I'm not the only one, it's just weird. Valve's under full damage control at the moment, anything that can get someone in trouble is being locked down on and while contact with them has been short on their end and very minimal, they're on watch. I would have made a reddit thread about this but it takes too long to create an account to post on the subreddit. Stay safe and if you can assist in this effort, whether it's to benefit Valve or further help the individual who accessed their sources go for it. Apologies if this is disorganized. I'll try to stick around more consecutively. Please don't pm me questions, just keep everything in the open.
Valve's development Intranet is completely cut off from the Internet since HL2 fiasco. 0/10 learn your history. The only leaks that people have obtained have been in person during visits to Valve HQ when employees had carelessly left up developer waterfalls on their monitors of upcoming projects such as L4D3 and Source 2.
Ian King
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Nathaniel Davis
>Hello friend I am being Prince Muhammad and I obtain half life 3 leaks but need $10,000 USD in order to release publically! Can you help me?