Steam, and some games on Steam, are reportedly affected by security issues, according to cybersecurity firm Check Point. According to a press release, the company already announced in September 2020 several vulnerabilities in the Steam library disclosed that should have allowed potential attackers to take over player PCs. Both game clients and servers are said to be affected.
Shortly after the problems became known in September 2020, Check Point informed Valve, whereupon the platform installed several patches for both the Steam library and the affected Valve games. The problems have also been reported to third parties. Here it is the responsibility of the respective game developers and publishers to fix the security gaps in their game clients and servers themselves.
Big games affected
Check Point states that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2 und Destiny 2 were affected by the security vulnerabilities. We checked again and asked for more information about which games were still at risk. In the event of a response, we will update this message.
The security holes were according to Check Point potentially highly explosive. Hackers were able to gain access via online matches in order to send infected data packets to other players. As a result, cybercriminals were apparently able to gain direct access to the opponents’ PCs. Apparently they could also crash games.
It remains to be seen how large the scale of cyber attacks actually carried out was due to the vulnerabilities. Finally, the bugs appear to have been addressed promptly before they became public knowledge. In this regard, we checked with Valve to see whether details were available on the extent to which hackers succeeded in accessing user data or carrying out successful cyber attacks. We will also update the article on this when we learn more.
Our large report on user data shows how explosive a security problem can potentially become on Steam:
more on the subject
Steam: What Valve Knows About You
What should you do now?
Since the security gaps on Steam have already been fixed, the library should now be safe again. However, Check Point recommends the following actions for Steam users:
“Gamers should pay attention to which games they downloaded and played before September this year, whether they have been updated accordingly and whether their computer is possibly infected.”
Is accordingly a security check with your anti-virus software as well as updating all Steam games advised.
