Steam Under Attack on Christmas Day

December 25, 2015 Erhan Altay Comments

It appears the Grinch has struck Steam on Christmas Day. Valve's popular PC gaming platform has been targeted by a hacking collective known as "SkidNP" who have stated their intention to take the service down, along with the servers for Minecraft.

Reports of the attack surfaced Christmas Day morning and have continued throughout the day. Users are experiencing issues with the Steam Community while others can't even log in. Perhaps the most frightening experience users are having is being logged in as a totally different person. When one reddit user tried purchasing a game, he was able to see the address and other personal information of a total stranger. Luckily the payment information was hidden.

From reddit user HalfBurtToast:

So, I went to go checkout on Steam after selecting a few games and I was taken to the checkout page which gave an error message, but still allowed me to select a payment method. When I went to choose a payment method, it opened the payment information forum like usual.
Except, the information filled in wasn't mine. I was for someone completely different than me that I'd never heard of before. Full name and address. The creditcard, thankfully, was not saved. As a IT security guy, this is some serious shit and could be a sign of a major vulnerability.

Until these issues are fixed, users should avoid trading, gifting, or purchasing items on Steam. Why a group of hackers would target gaming platforms on Christmas Day remains unexplained. We were unable to find an official twitter account or other statement from the group, but interested parties can learn more about the attack as it develops through the #SkidNP twitter feed. Best estimates so far are that the group is using a common form of of disruption known as a 'distributed denial-of-service' or DDoS for short attack. Learn more about being a l33t h4x0r this Christmas on Wikipedia!

Issues users have reported thus far: