Valve says there’s no current need to change your Steam password despite reports of a recent data leak.
For some context, alarm bells were sounded on Friday after various media outlets reported that up to 89 million Steam accounts had been compromised, potentially leaving roughly two-thirds of active Steam users at risk of having private information like passwords and payment details sold to the dark web. Pretty scary right?
Well, we can all rest easy, as Valve has issued a news release assuring that, while a leak of some form did occur, it only contained a bunch of old text messages with one-time validation codes, which expire after 15 minutes. The only information that can be extracted from these texts is the phone numbers they were sent to, and there isn’t a whole lot anyone can do with that information alone.
“The leaked data did not associate the phone numbers with a Steam account, password information, payment information or other personal data,” Valve said. “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.”
The initial, and in hindsight overblown, warning of a Steam leak seems to have originated from a LinkedIn post by user Underdark.ai, but it didn’t seem to get widespread attention until Twitter user Mellow_Online1 shared it on Friday.
Valve said in no uncertain terms that “you do not need to change your passwords or phone numbers as a result of this event. It is a good reminder to treat any account security messages that you have not explicitly requested as suspicious.”
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