How was stolen half-life 2

A few days ago , one of the earliest versions of Half-Life to date on the press appeared on the network. The degree of incompleteness of that build can be judged by the fact that the central character in the game is a bespectacled theoretical physicist with a protective suit and mount, and the dwarf-like bearded man Ivan, a space biker confronting the staff of a research center. 15 years ago the contents of the disc was intended exclusively for representatives of regular print media.

But much more interesting is the story of the earliest, so to speak, demo version of the sequel to the game and the way it falls into the hands of gamers. In order to understand how it all began, let us go back ten years ago.

Half-Life 2 was just a passing rumor that agitated the minds of gamers, but at the E3 exhibition in May 2003, the product demonstration made such a strong impression on the public that the video game that had not yet been released won several awards. In Seattle, they talked about the release date in September 2003, and the supposedly unscripted scenes of the gameplay at E3 made us believe in it.
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At the same time, on the other side of the world, in a tiny (slightly more than two thousand people) town of Schönau in Germany, 22-year-old Axel Djembe, a hacker, who was prepared to play a major role, lived with his father. The hacking world tightened the gamer by accident - once he downloaded and installed the sdbot virus program disguised as a Warcraft III key generator, but instead of cleaning the system and forgetting about the Trojan, Djemba subjected the product to reverse engineering and studied its operating principles.

The program was controlled by an IRC server, and Axel tracked down his operator. Again, instead of handing it over to law enforcement agencies, Djembe began asking questions about malware. Today he is the owner of a Steam account with games for 2 thousand euros, but at that time he was not so financially independent. Therefore, an aspiring cracker created his own malware, stealing CD keys in order to gain access to the games that Dzhembe was eager to play. Over time, his Agobot became one of the most dangerous Trojans of that era, mainly due to the competent choice of unclosed Windows vulnerabilities.

Jembe’s criminal activities were fueled not by the desire to make a profit or damage, but only by his passion for video games. Half-Life was among the favorites. Like all her other fans, in 2002, Axel suffered from the absence of any hints of a sequel, which prompted him to break the Valve corporate network.

As the hacker says, everything happened by chance - during the scanning of the network, Djembe discovered that there was a weak spot behind security from the inside: their domain name servers were resolved by anonymous AXFR requests, thanks to which all subdomains of the name ValveSoftware.com were received.

In the port scan logs, Axel found a server that was not filtered by a firewall outside the Valve network, which was owned by Tangis, a wearable computer device company. It was publicly accessible to write the root of the site to which the attacker unloaded the ASP scripts. Thus, Djembe gained access to the inside of the corporate network from the first attempt. Axel dumped hash passwords of users of the system, and thanks to the technical base of the Swiss Higher Technical School of Zurich, passwords were quickly restored.

Looking around the environment, Djembe ran across documents, project requirements, notes on the creation of the game - exactly what he came for. On the other hand, even after weeks about the fact of penetration into Valve, so no one suspected, so the hacker was emboldened. On one of the machines, he discovered the source codes of the game, in which he was impatient to play. Due to the performance of the Perforce version management system, uploading did not cause much trouble.



The game, however, did not run on Axel’s computer. He turned off the shaders, which made it much more boring. The hacker remembered that the code had several forks, which Djembe began to check in a row.

Axel says that he did not lay out the code in public access, but only gave it to a friend of his boast for the sake of it, weakly thinking about the consequences. The acquaintance promised not to allow leaks, but did not keep his word. It was impossible to stop the distribution after getting into the bittorrent network, and on October 2, 2003, the source code of the unfinished game became available to anyone.

On the same day, the head of Valve, Gabe Newell, published a topic titled “I need help from the community” on Half-Life 2 (now ValveTime.net), where he recognized the authenticity of the stolen source codes, listed the facts he knew and asked the readers to help find the hacker. Gabe already knew that three weeks before someone had access to his e-mail, and some machines had keyloggers specially written for Valve — they were not identified by antiviruses.

The community of players reacted ambiguously. At that time, the release of Half-Life 2 was already delayed, and from the leaked material it became obvious that the game would definitely not have been released by the end of 2003. In fact, the leak included maps that were developed at unidentified time intervals, but the fact that all the scenes shown at E3 were harshly scripted, although the opposite was claimed, caused the anger of the fans. One way or another, the community could not help.

There were unpleasant processes inside Valve: the developers' mood after a product leakage, which had cost $ 1 million a month to work on, had fallen, and the release of the game was hard to imagine in the foreseeable future. One of the young designers once asked Newell, “Will it kill the company?”

On February 15, 2004, the hacker contacted Valve and explained the unintended nature of his actions. Djembe said that he had never wished to cause such damage, and regretted how events had developed. In the second letter, a naive young man who dreamed of working for some game developer asked Gabe to employ him in the company.

Suddenly, Newell answered in the affirmative, and offered to conduct a telephone interview. It is clear that all they needed from Djembe was the recognition of committing unlawful acts recorded on tape - a typical FBI trick based on a sense of pride inherent in any person and especially a hacker of computer security systems. Interview with the hacker was conducted by Alfred Reynolds, the developer of Counter Strike and Steam and the future script writer Portal Eric Wolpo, although the latter doubts Axel's story, because at that time he was not working at Valve.

For forty minutes, the hacker inquired in detail about the details of hacking, network penetration, skills and experience, and Djembe, having lost all guilt in the presence of his idols, told everything. Axel received an invitation for a second interview, this time on American soil, in Seattle, at Valve's office. However, due to access to Valve servers, the FBI decided to take Djembe right in Germany and not use this trap.

The morning of May 7, 2004 was not very pleasant for Axel: in his own bed, he was awakened by armed men, charged with penetrating the network of an American corporation and causing damage in excess of $ 250 million and drove to the police station. From that day on, a young hacker began various trials: at first he was suspected of involvement in the Sasser worm, because he, like Djembe, used the vulnerability of the local Windows security system authentication server.

Then questions shifted to the mainstream of the Valve hacking. Axel went to cooperate and honestly and frankly told everything, without demanding a lawyer. Djembe recalls that the hacking motives only aroused sympathy in the interrogator. The burglar spent two weeks in prison, and only making sure that Axel did not hide, the police decided to let him go.

We should not think that the hacker was unlucky: his treatment in the USA could have been much stricter. Waiting for trial, Djembe tried to change his life for the better. He completed his professional education and got a job in the field of computer security. Now his job was to set up the systems and close the “holes” rather than using them for his own purposes.

Finally, in November 2006, a trial took place that lasted seven hours, but none of the Valve representatives attended. The lack of evidence for the publication of the source code was in favor of Axel, although recognition of penetration into the corporation’s private network was already recorded. The court took into account the difficult childhood of a hacker, and the only punishment he received was two years of probation.

By the time of the trial, 8.6 million copies of the finally-released Half-Life 2 had already been sold, which was beating every conceivable record. Released November 16, 2004, the game is the third most sold non-console video game in history. It is difficult to say whether this code leak worsened or improved sales. Today, Valve prefer not to talk about this topic, and modifications using stolen source codes are given the status of illegal ones, and for almost ten years not a single official statement has been issued on the subject of leakage.

Based on the Half-Life Wiki , Pixel Smashers and Simon Parkin's articles in Eurogamer.net . Distributing a stolen beta to Free-Torrents.org .