From PC World: Five days and countless angry Reddit threads later, Valve has finally issued a statement about the caching issue that occurred last Friday—what happened, how many people were affected, and what Valve’s doing now.
You can find the full statement here, but the gist of it? It’s exactly what everyone thought happened, a.k.a. when hit with a DDOS attack on Christmas morning, someone accidentally pushed some bad code that caused a caching error of private info.
Or, as Valve puts it:
“Early Christmas morning (Pacific Standard Time), the Steam Store was the target of a DoS attack which prevented the serving of store pages to users. Attacks against the Steam Store, and Steam in general, are a regular occurrence that Valve handles both directly and with the help of partner companies, and typically do not impact Steam users. During the Christmas attack, traffic to the Steam store increased 2,000 percent over the average traffic during the Steam Sale.
In response to this specific attack, caching rules managed by a Steam web caching partner were deployed in order to both minimize the impact on Steam Store servers and continue to route legitimate user traffic. During the second wave of this attack, a second caching configuration was deployed that incorrectly cached web traffic for authenticated users. This configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store responses which were generated for other users. Incorrect Store responses varied from users seeing the front page of the Store displayed in the wrong language, to seeing the account page of another user.
Once this error was identified, the Steam Store was shut down and a new caching configuration was deployed.”
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