Valve boss Gabe Newell has confirmed in a letter to the Steam website that a reported hack of the Steam forums did indeed take place as reported earlier this week, but the intrusion runs deeper than you might think.

According to Newell, intruders breached the Steam database, giving them access to not only the Steam forums, but also to customer email addresses, billing addresses, game purchases, hashed and salted passwords, and worse, encrypted credit card details. For the moment, Valve doesn’t have any evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information was taken by the intruders or that the encrypted protection on credit card numbers and passwords was cracked, but Newell is advising customers to monitor their accounts for any unauthorized usage.

Valve currently only knows of a few Steam forum accounts that were compromised and thus far no Steam game accounts, but all accounts will be required to reset their passwords the next time they log in.

For now, the Steam forums remain down and Valve joins SOE, Frogster, Codemasters, BioWare and several others in the not-so-illustrious Botched Security Hall of Shame for 2011.

Source: Steam Forums

Original Story: Rumor: Steam Forums Hacked

Update: Gabe Newell Updates on Steam's November Data Breach

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

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.

Gabe.