Many of you have probably noticed the recent Steam forums downtime, but Valve have today confirmed that it's more than just technical issues. In an message sent to the Steam user base, Valve chief Gabe Newell revealed that not only were the Steam forums defaced by hackers, but customer database records of forum users were accessed.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

We don't have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.

While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.

We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn't be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.

We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.

I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

With so many big titles depending on Steamworks support this holiday season, we're certainly glad this has only affected the functionality of the Steam forums and not Steam proper thus far. Let's hope it stays that way.