Valve locking down publishing Steam builds with SMS codes due to Malware

I mean they gotta do what the gotta do

Why is the game blurred? This developer should put their hands up and admit they failed basic computer security. They compromised their customers safety, so realistically it should be public knowledge (else, a customer could be infected by their infected game and not even know it!). Even if that may only be "less than 100 Steam Accounts". I doubt this is the first incident.

They should absolutely be public about this.


Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 12 October 2023 at 3:01 pm UTC

Quoting: BlackBloodRumWhy is the game blurred? This developer should put their hands up and admit they failed basic computer security.

You mean . . . they're running Windows?!

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: BlackBloodRumWhy is the game blurred? This developer should put their hands up and admit they failed basic computer security.

You mean . . . they're running Windows?!

That could well be true! Imagine having to use Windows every day though? The agony, the anger, the frustration, the distractions and to top it all off, you upload an infected game.

I find it kind of weird that we've had to provide a login every time we have to pay, but that devs could just change public facing builds without any form of extra explicit authentication. Sounds like something that should have been done a long time ago.

Quoting: BlackBloodRum

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: BlackBloodRumWhy is the game blurred? This developer should put their hands up and admit they failed basic computer security.

You mean . . . they're running Windows?!

That could well be true! Imagine having to use Windows every day though? The agony, the anger, the frustration, the distractions and to top it all off, you upload an infected game.

Many think windows disease is incurable but it is very curable. So make sure to get a Linux or BSD distribution for your computer and cure this disease

Quoting: BlackBloodRumWhy is the game blurred? This developer should put their hands up and admit they failed basic computer security. They compromised their customers safety, so realistically it should be public knowledge (else, a customer could be infected by their infected game and not even know it!). Even if that may only be "less than 100 Steam Accounts". I doubt this is the first incident.

They should absolutely be public about this.

The developer only seems to have posted about it on their Steam forum but not in any announcement.

I wonder why Steam can't just support hardware tokens, like everyone else. I hate using phones as security tokens because they become a single point of failure (and also because I don't trust big business not to lose/abuse my phone number). :S

Quoting: Nateman1000

Quoting: BlackBloodRum

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: BlackBloodRumWhy is the game blurred? This developer should put their hands up and admit they failed basic computer security.

You mean . . . they're running Windows?!

That could well be true! Imagine having to use Windows every day though? The agony, the anger, the frustration, the distractions and to top it all off, you upload an infected game.

Many think windows disease is incurable but it is very curable. So make sure to get a Linux or BSD distribution for your computer and cure this disease

This is probably ignorance in my part, but how is security better with Linux in this situation? We're (mostly) running these programs wide open out of the home drive (maybe some ppl are using flatpack or snap, but even then that's not a default requirement on most distro and people still poke holes in those sandboxes regularly). No, it can't infect "the system", but since we're executing programs out of /home, isn't that good enough? The malware is still running under the users permissions, it can still execute in /home, read data, access the network, etc.

Maybe I'm missing something fundamental with Linux security, but it seems once I log in anything within the user space can run under my permissions, malware or not? Especially if it's malware hidden in a program/game that I intentionally started?

I've used Linux a very long time, but I'm self taught.... Security is one of those Linux areas that's always been complex for me to grasp in a meaningful way.

Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: Nateman1000

Quoting: BlackBloodRum

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: BlackBloodRumWhy is the game blurred? This developer should put their hands up and admit they failed basic computer security.

You mean . . . they're running Windows?!

That could well be true! Imagine having to use Windows every day though? The agony, the anger, the frustration, the distractions and to top it all off, you upload an infected game.

Many think windows disease is incurable but it is very curable. So make sure to get a Linux or BSD distribution for your computer and cure this disease

This is probably ignorance in my part, but how is security better with Linux in this situation? We're (mostly) running these programs wide open out of the home drive (maybe some ppl are using flatpack or snap, but even then that's not a default requirement on most distro and people still poke holes in those sandboxes regularly). No, it can't infect "the system", but since we're executing programs out of /home, isn't that good enough? The malware is still running under the users permissions, it can still execute in /home, read data, access the network, etc.

Maybe I'm missing something fundamental with Linux security, but it seems once I log in anything within the user space can run under my permissions, malware or not? Especially if it's malware hidden in a program/game that I intentionally started?

I've used Linux a very long time, but I'm self taught.... Security is one of those Linux areas that's always been complex for me to grasp in a meaningful way.

For a typical desktop system without additional protection whatsoever, the malware may work. But consider this, what is malware trying to do, and where is it looking?

It's almost certain it'll look for typical Windows locations, which would be those provided by Proton (Wine). In the case of a Steam game running via proton for example, that means if it will find steamapps/compatdata/(gameid)/pfx/drive_c/* by default. The good news is, unlike regular wine, proton doesn't link users/steamuser/Documents to your real documents location.

So it's possible the malware will simply do nothing of harm to a Linux machine.

However, that doesn't mean you can simply forget and dismiss it! It is possible the malware has been trained to handle Linux, in which case it will try to get access to your home directory. Worst case here is your home directory gets hosed, and data which your user has permission to modify is altered, which is fairly minor.

You can prevent this situation in a couple of ways, you could prevent that access to those files using AppArmor or SELinux, you could combine that with, or use only flatpak with a proper configuration by modifying the permissions to revoke "All User/System/anything Files". It simply doesn't need it, along with disabling access to xdg-music, xdg-pictures. Steam only needs to access the locations that it is instructed to download games to (Your library), so you can specify only that directory as read/write and block everything else. It shouldn't need other directories, but if it does and doesn't need to write to them, then set it to read-only.

This advice applies to basically all flatpak apps. Only give minimal permissions. For example with Bottles, you might download your GOG games to a home directory folder like ~/Games, well bottles doesn't need to write to those GOG installers. So it can be safely set to read-only for bottles.

Oh, and the big one: Keep things updated with the latest security patches.

These are simple security measures, but it should be more than enough to prevent windows-based malware from escaping its wine prefix.

It might not however, stop a specifically targeted to you attack. A key thing to remember, security isn't something you can just say "must be like this" for. Different environments have different threat models.

Know your threat model, and adjust your security as necessary.