half-life 2 delayed to APRIL!

[cris8762]

A new Valve game is delayed.....wow, i never saw that one coming

[speeddemon]

Originally posted by MantisMag
ok here's what happened according to gabe newell. so stop speculatiing and start duiscussing what actually happened please.

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve. Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code. Here is what we know:
1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.
Well, this sucks.
What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, [email protected]. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.
We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.

Gabe

They knew someone was getting in, and still didn't fix it? Change the email passwords, update the mail server, and for the love of god don't use Outlook. If stuff like that is happening it should be resolved immediately, not half worked on for weeks. And they also didn't notice that the keystroke recorder was sending out data? Well, either it was emailing stuff out, or it opened its own port. A good (well set up) firewall should have stopped that before it happened. So if it was emailing stuff out (Im guessing here since apparently this guys mail account was hijacked), well don't use Outlook. Theres plenty of other mail clients out there.

EDIT: And if you do use Outlook, DISABLE THE PREVIEW PANE.

[netjunk1e]

Well to all thoose who are waiting for Half-Life 2, all i have to say is it is going to be awsome. I have played the Beta copy floating around. Eventhough it is nowhere near done, all of the general physics and controls are done. It is only mapping that is not complete. The game runs great and is very fun to play.

I have to get some sleep now because i have been playing it since 10 last night and it is 10am now. Too bad i have class in 2 hours.