Valve Hacker Caught by Dutch Police

CAUGHT : Valve Hacker Caught by Dutch Police

by Donnie B

PC Gaming

June 30th, 2008

http://analoghype.com/blog/506/valve-hacker-caught-by-dutch-police/

A man who hacked into a Valve file server and stole the credit card numbers of Steam Cyber Cafe users was caught by police in the Dutch town of Maastricht this Tuesday.

According to the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, the 20 year old hacker had managed to “burn 13 million Euros playing poker online and shopping for notebooks, flat screens and MP3 players” before being caught.

Known by the online handle MaddoxX, the man first made news when he boasted of the Valve hack in April of 2007.

“We also don’t want money from VALVe,” he wrote on the No-Steam forum last year. “We want a simple message on their site.”

MaddoxX then posted an archived file that included unverified credit card numbers, transaction amounts, Valve’s supposed bank balance, and data that reportedly allowed the creation of counterfeit cyber cafe certificates.

Valve quickly responded to the breach of security, creating an email address titled “Catch_A_Thief@valvesoftware.com” to encourage citizens to help the authorities track down MaddoxX.

In addition to the Valve caper, MaddoxX is being charged with hacking his way into an Activision server and subsequently downloading an unfinished version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. MaddoxX also stole 50,000 credit card numbers from an English ticketing website, according to the ITExaminer.

The criminal was eventually nabbed by a Dutch police unit called Team High Tech Crime. There is no word on whether members of Team High Tech Crime go by code-names or wear special uniforms