The Valve Half-Life 2 Hack, 5 Years Later

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The Valve Half-Life 2 Hack, 5 Years Later

Post by trog @ 01:49pm 13/11/08 | 20 Comments

Wired have a brief but cool article looking at the intrusion into Valve Software's network that resulted in the leaking of the Half-Life 2 source code before the game had even hit shelves and Valve's subsequent attempts to trap the German-based hacker by, well, lying and pretending to offer him a job in the US so the FBI could nab him:

Coordinating with the FBI in Seattle, Valve began a correspondence with DaGuy, who expressed interest in getting a job with the company. From clues in the e-mail, the FBI identified the aspiring employee as Axel Gembe, of Schonau, Germany.
...
Perhaps sensing that his relocation expenses would be shouldered by U.S. taxpayers, Gembe didn't take the bait. He was ultimately charged in Germany, where he was sentenced to probation.

Worth a read!

half-life 2 valve software

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Snakeman
Posted 01:54pm 13/11/08

Even before this thing happened I swear I have seen this sort of thing in a movie or a book where they give this guy a job for telling them where all the flaws are in the system. Mabey I'm just thinking of "Sneakers". Surely the guy must of smelt a rat when they offered him a job ???

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StreX
Posted 02:09pm 13/11/08

I heard about same kinda deal to catch graffiti wankers in NYC.

They advertised for a building to be covered in graffiti that will be featured in a movie, when the shitheads turned up and sprayed their tags everywhere, they were matched up and charged. suckaaaz!

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Reduaram
Posted 02:10pm 13/11/08

What kind of idiot thinks he can get a job at a company he hacked?

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z0r
Posted 02:16pm 13/11/08

They advertised for a building to be covered in graffiti that will be featured in a movie, when the shitheads turned up and sprayed their tags everywhere, they were matched up and charged. suckaaaz!

what's shit y'all be callin' this? contrapment! this shit be contrapment, yo.

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trog
Posted 03:13pm 13/11/08

What kind of idiot thinks he can get a job at a company he hacked?

Lots of famous hackers make a career out of their exploits (ha) so it's not really that weird, although yeh, getting employed by a company after doing something like that would certainly be unusual. I laughed at the bit about relocation expenses in the quote.

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Fireblood
Posted 03:18pm 13/11/08

Even before this thing happened I swear I have seen this sort of thing in a movie or a book where they give this guy a job for telling them where all the flaws are in the system. Mabey I'm just thinking of "Sneakers". Surely the guy must of smelt a rat when they offered him a job ???

"Catch me if you can" the movie with that guy from titanic?
It was based on a true story wasn't it?

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ravn0s
Posted 03:36pm 13/11/08

yer the fbi (i think) hired him to detect fraudulent money/cheques etc.

last edited by ravn0s at 15:36:51 13/Nov/08

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ctd
Posted 03:26pm 13/11/08

That was so frustrating back then because if I remember correctly a similar thing happened to doom3 - everyone was file sharing a leaked doom3 alpha demo at a QGL I remember.

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3dee
Posted 03:39pm 13/11/08

And it didn't run on my comp :(

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fpot
Posted 05:24pm 13/11/08

doom alpha is a bit different to the source code being released.

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ctd
Posted 05:29pm 13/11/08

yeah I know but wasn't that the reason it was delayed? Some nerds at ATI leaked the demo onto the net.

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3dee
Posted 05:52pm 13/11/08

God I hate Sean Paul's music. Hip Hop Reggae makes me cringe.

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whoop
Posted 06:53pm 13/11/08

Even before this thing happened I swear I have seen this sort of thing in a movie or a book where they give this guy a job for telling them where all the flaws are in the system. Mabey I'm just thinking of "Sneakers". Surely the guy must of smelt a rat when they offered him a job ???

Sneakers was kind of like that except the dude they caught hacking actually went to jail, the one who went for pizza came back, saw the cops and he's the one that was the security consultant. The dude who got caught was the one who had the little black box capable of hacking everyone's gibson so long as sandra bullock doesn't get near it and upload a virus into your mainframe that erases all the bad things you've done.

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Tepid
Posted 07:06pm 13/11/08

lol i used to frequent the halflife2.net forums all the time back then. it was hilarious... first denial, then a witch hunt, then bannings if you talked about the alpha. i believed it was real and was rewarded when i downloaded it. it was pretty lame but some of the levels seemed a lot better than the ones that made it into the game.

the source code was pretty interesting to read if you've ever coded.

it was pretty big stuff and at the time i harboured pretty big resentment towards valve, first for steam (which at the time was really crappy and never worked) and secondly because they kept insisting it would be out on whatever day they kept saying, right up until 1 week before its release.

the hacker guy said he released the code mainly cos of that. he said he did it to prove that valve had been lying all along and that the game was about only 70% complete.

anyway it was pretty interesting at the time, drama bombs and drama queens...

oh, then a few weeks later, someone got into gabe's account on some forum he used to post on, and said THE GAME IS GOLD or something to that extent. because it had been verified as gabe newell in the past, everyone believed it over the whole internet.

only a few hours later did gabe find out what was going on and set things straight. the funniest part? his password for the account was "gaben"

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thermite
Posted 07:28pm 13/11/08

Yeah the only time hackers get jobs as anti-hackers is after they've been caught. Same with Catch Me If You Can, he was already behind bars when he was offered the job.

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Colours
Posted 12:55pm 16/11/08

Hahaha epic, it seems to me like something you'd do to a poor bastard in Civilization IV. Tricksies!

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Crizane Tribal
Posted 05:13pm 16/11/08

There was a movie called Takedown that was about the capture of Kevin Mitnick (played by Skeet Ulrich). He now works as a network security advisor or something to that extent. The movie is nothing at all like the real sequence of events.

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