From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
On Tue, 23 Sep 2025 10:04:15 -0700, Justisaur <
justisaur@yahoo.com>
wrote:
Oof. Yea for crypto being so much more secure /s.
I mean, technically, the crypto *is* secure. He's not getting his
money back from whatever account his stolen money is currently hidden
in, after all. ;-)
The game had a password-logger in it. It captured his Steam password
and then it looks as if it scanned his computer for various browser
extensions used to access his crypto wallets, and captured any
passwords entered there. Technically, the crypto itself was never
hacked; the funds were transferred, as far as the crypto-system was
concerned, legitimately.
(Yes, I saw your /s but, c'mon, this is me! ;-)
But the entire crypto-infrastructure is just open to problems like
this, since there is --intentionally-- no oversight that might flag
(and potentially halt) bulk transfers like this, and no way to reverse
a transfer once it's been made. It's a risk you take if you go into
crypto, and its encumbant on the end-user to protect their
'investment' with proper security on their own end. TANSTAAFL, after
all.
That said, it's another black eye for Steam. I understand the
difficulty of policing this sort of thing: modern malware can be
extremely difficult to detect, and the sheer volume of games Valve
offers only makes things harder. But Valve has been extremely lax with
who and what games they allow on their marketplace, and even more lax
regarding updates. It's the SCALE that's the problem. I think Valve
would be better off being more discriminatory.
Valve added 19,000 new games to their marketplace in 2024, the vast
bulk of which didn't see more than a 100 players. I don't think anyone
would complain if Valve cut that number by half. It wouldn't
significantly impact Valve's bottom line (they aren't really making
money off most of those games), it would clean out a lot of cruft from
the store, few gamers would even notice the lack, and Valve's
resources could be better used to detect malware like in the above
story.
Anyway, it's a good reminder that all those free games we're tossing
about here on csipga may be free for a reason. Get them for The
Number, sure, but look closely at them before actually *running* them
;-)
--- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2