The boy who stole Half Life 2 source code (2011)

It&#x27;s stories like these that&#x27;s inspired me to start up a new project at oppressed.me. I&#x27;m trying to compile a list of hackers and hacktivists that have been imprisoned in order to let the internet easily send them correspondence. I&#x27;m also going to ask publishers for donations of older copies of technical books to send them.<p>A lot of hackers are just kids that make a stupid mistake. During their time in jail, their skills get soft or they&#x27;ll get hardened by their time there. My hope is to let them know that people on the outside still are thinking of them and to help them keep their skills up-to-date.<p>I&#x27;m a bit overwhelmed with a startup at the moment, but I anticipate the non-profit to be formed and to launch sometime in the fall.

I still remember the day HL2 leaked. All of my friends and I were in IRC trying to download the damn thing from DCC bots.<p>I was lucky and got a slot that provided the full 80kbyte&#x2F;s. I finished the download first, but my PC was pretty old back then so I didn&#x27;t even bother trying to run it. Instead, I removed my hard drive (my system drive!), picked up a friend and we drove to another friend who had the fastest PC at the time. About 30 mins later all of us (I believe 5 or 6 guys) gathered in a tiny dorm and just stood in awe as we booted up HL2.<p>There was barely any gameplay present. You could just walk around in some maps and admire the graphics. It didn&#x27;t matter. If we hadn&#x27;t been stoked before, we were now.<p>In hindsight, this all was just an amazing PR stunt. Fun times.

Unfortunately, I&#x27;ve never found an in-depth discussion about the part about where they attempt to lure him to the United States so that he can be arrested. It always strikes me as a bit excessive.<p>That Valve worked with the FBI to get him sufficient permission to enter the US with the false pretense of getting a job seems to make this feel like much more personal than anything else.<p>And I&#x27;m left scratching my head as to what it really would have accomplished...

I&#x27;m not condoning breaking into the network and stealing source code, but what financial damage did this cause to Valve? The article repeatedly refers to financial damages, but I&#x27;m not sure how that is.

Interesting story, terrible article. Valve has always followed the &quot;when its ready&quot; release model. The article makes it sound like there was a huge conspiracy to keep valve&#x27;s ineptness a secret, else Gabe would have no alternative than to commit ritual suicide.

The guy is extremely lucky for getting into the hands of the German police and because of his nationality.<p>I think that if he wasn&#x27;t German, but from another &#x27;major&#x27; or &#x27;minor&#x27; EU country, Austrilia and many others he would have been extradited at no time to the US.

I remember reading this article a few years ago. It was a very divisive article for me. Early 20s me would have felt bad for Gembe. Early 30s me felt bad for Valve.<p>I don&#x27;t know where the cycle goes from here. Maybe the real wisdom is feeling bad for both?

This was an amazing and somewhat sad story. How&#x27;s Gembe doing today? Based on his near adoration of the Valve developers, it would be fitting if he worked in the gaming industry. Maybe he could set things right by helping to make Half-Life 3?

I wonder if it was around this time when people wisened up to disabling zone-transfer requests. Tangentially, I took part in a CTF recently and one of the tasks was to get the list of hosts from a domain. The hint was &quot;My sword. My bow. And my Axfr!&quot;

&quot;Have you any idea how lucky you are that we got to you before you got on that plane?&quot;<p>I think the German police officer was right. If you got arrested on US soil, (your side of) the story could have been very, very different.

Valve didn&#x27;t use password hash salting? That seems borderline ridiculous. Pretty much the only way he could have broken the hashes is if this is so.<p>Valve&#x27;s use of SourceSafe at the time is another black mark, though not related to the security breach.

<i>&quot;Have you any idea how lucky you are that we got to you before you got on that plane?&quot;</i><p>The difference in the way he was treated by police and the justice system (and how different it is than what we&#x27;ve come to expect in America) is what struck me the most about this story.

You can&#x27;t really blame a kid at that age... Kids at that age have no sense of fear or can&#x27;t recognize what is punishable or not. Everything is a game, especially years back as that internet was not so evolved and the laws around it weren&#x27;t so strict.<p>Its Valve&#x27;s fault for letting a 16 y&#x2F;o install malwares on their computers... When you are developing something you got to be serious about its security as well if you want it to remain a secret. It feels to me like their employees and IT department had no actual sense of what security was (Employees going off installing whatever on their computer, and IT team not being able to track down malware and outgoing packets to unknown sources...)