{"id":4271,"date":"2018-11-12T13:45:39","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T13:45:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/steam-bug-allowed-unlimited-free-downloads\/"},"modified":"2018-11-12T13:45:39","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T13:45:39","slug":"steam-bug-allowed-unlimited-free-downloads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/steam-bug-allowed-unlimited-free-downloads\/","title":{"rendered":"Steam bug allowed unlimited free downloads"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div property=\"articleBody\">\n<figure class=\"media-landscape no-caption full-width lead\"><span class=\"image-and-copyright-container\"><\/p>\n<p>                <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"js-image-replace\" alt=\"Steam logo\" src=\"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/320\/cpsprodpb\/12C61\/production\/_104279867_steanm.png\" width=\"976\" height=\"549\"\/><span class=\"off-screen\">Image copyright<\/span><br \/>\n                 <span class=\"story-image-copyright\">Valve<\/span><\/p>\n<p>            <\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p class=\"story-body__introduction\">A man has been given $20,000 (\u00a315,500) for discovering a bug in the Steam video games store that let people download any game for free.<\/p>\n<p>Security researcher Artem Moskowsky found a flaw in Steam&#8217;s portal for games developers that let anybody generate licence keys without paying.<\/p>\n<p>Millions of people use Steam to buy and download games on PC and Mac computers.<\/p>\n<p>Mr Moskowsky told Steam owner Valve about the bug and it awarded him the money as part of its bug bounty scheme.<\/p>\n<p>Many companies reward people who privately disclose security problems so they can be fixed, rather than sharing the information online.<\/p>\n<ul class=\"story-body__unordered-list\">\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/technology-42052473\" class=\"story-body__link\">Drone maker DJI in cyber-security row over bug bounty<\/a><\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/technology-35971380\" class=\"story-body__link\">How to make big bucks hunting cyber-bugs<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Mr Moskowsky told news site <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2018\/11\/09\/valve_steam_key_vulnerability\/\" class=\"story-body__link-external\">the Register<\/a> that he discovered the problem by accident when exploring the Steam partner portal.<\/p>\n<p>The portal lets game studios generate licence keys for their software, so they can give a copy to fans or journalists to review.<\/p>\n<p>But he found that modifying the request let anybody generate thousands of codes for any game they wanted. These could theoretically be sold online on the black market.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I managed to bypass the verification of ownership of the game by changing only one parameter,&#8221; he told the Register.<\/p>\n<p>Valve awarded him $15,000 and a $5,000 bonus for making the private disclosure. The flaw has since been fixed.<\/p>\n<p>Valve said an investigation of its logs did not show that anybody had exploited the bug. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/technology-46183000\">Source<\/a> by <a href=\"\">[author_name]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Image copyright Valve A man has been given $20,000 (\u00a315,500) for discovering a bug in the Steam video games store that let people download any game for free. Security researcher Artem Moskowsky found a flaw in Steam&#8217;s portal for games developers that let anybody generate licence keys without paying. Millions of people use Steam to &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":4272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.styledeals.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}