Question

In the I found a security hole in Steam that gave me every game's license keys and all I got was this... oh nice: $20,000. Summarize the Steam finding and compare it to lab.

Answer 1

A bloke has told how he discovered a bug in Valve's Steam marketplace that could have been exploited by thieves to steal game license keys and play pirated titles. Researcher Artem Moskowsky told The Register earlier this week that he stumbled across the vulnerability – which earned him a $20,000 bug bounty for reporting it – by accident while looking over the Steam partner portal. That's the site developers use to manage the games they make available for download from Steam. A professional bug-hunter and pentester, Moskowsky said he has been doing security research since he was in school, and for the past several years, he has made a career out of finding and reporting flaws. In this case, while looking through the Steam developer site, he noticed it was fairly easy to change parameters in an API request, and get activation keys for a selected game in return. Those keys, also known as CD keys, can be used to activate and play games downloaded from Steam. The API is provided so developers and their partners can obtain license keys for their titles to pass onto gamers. "This bug was discovered randomly during the exploration of the functionality of a web application," Moskowsky explained. "It could have been used by any attacker who had access to the portal."

Impressively, this $20,000 bounty isn't even the biggest payout Moskowsky has received from the games service. Back in July, he was given a cool $25,000 for weeding out a SQL Injection bug in the same developer portal.