Valve confirms Steam has not suffered a data breach

This week, someone claimed to have breached Valve's Steam servers, coming away with account information for over 89 million users. Something seemed a bit fishy about the claim at the time, but now, Valve has confirmed that no data breach has taken place.

In a statement shared today on Steam, Valve said that after examining the claimed leak, it has determined that it is in fact an SMS cache, containing no information on Steam accounts.

“The leak consisted of older text messages that included one-time codes that were only valid for 15-minute time frames and the phone numbers they were sent to. The leaked data did not associate the phone numbers with a Steam account, password information, payment information or other personal data”, Valve wrote.

Valve continues to explain that old text messages can't be used to gain access to a Steam account, and that there are extra protections in place when an account attempts to change email or password using SMS:

“Old text messages cannot be used to breach the security of your Steam account, and whenever a code is used to change your Steam email or password using SMS, you will receive a confirmation via email and/or Steam secure messages.”

As SMS is an unencrypted messaging system, most sites and services recommend using an authenticator app instead. The Steam mobile app can be set up as an authenticator pretty easily, so you should be using that instead of SMS authentication if you are serious about keeping your account safe.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: There was no Steam hack but more people should start using the Steam authenticator rather than SMS. If you haven't changed over, now would be a good time to do so.

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