Anyone else's steam suddenly in French?

Wyvern

Wyvern

Khaleesi
Mine started up fine this morning, now after turning the pc on again, it has decided I am french and so is my brother. . . And it wont let us change back

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No Idea but I went in offline mode.
It goes without saying, but avoid logging into any Steam websites until the issue has been remedied.
If you know you're already logged in, do NOT visit any Steam Community or Steam Store URL.
This includes any internet browser and the Steam Desktop/Mobile Client!

Playing games online should be fine. It'll prevent anybody else from logging into your account via desktop client.
 
Someone is theorizing that it's a server caching issue.

It's a problem with their caching-server (varnish), caching pages that should not be cached (such as Account-Details, Cart, etc.). It invalidates after some time and is re-cached when the next user visits the page with their profile. You are not actually logged in (as in, you take over the session of the user), you just see pages rendered for others than yourself. This is why different parts of steam appear as different users.

Which page you see is probably dependent on the edge node (first server you connect to) closest to you, hence why different users see different profiles.

My guess to how this could've happened is that an untested configuration got activated when steam went down earlier, e.g. due to an auto-conf service (puppet, chef) pulling an untested config or some of their live servers being replaced by staging / development servers. It's also possible that they were under heavy load and the engineer on duty reconfigured all their edge nodes to cache more aggressively.

Let's hope they fix this fast, because this is a major data leak. I can see private E-Mail and account names. Let's hope their cache server is not delivering internal pages.
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That would make the most sense.
 
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HavocXphere said:
Just log out & wait.

Nobody's account is in any real danger as far as I can tell
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Yeah looks like its some cache problem

So simple solution would be to log out of Steam, go to your email and wait for any news. Also I recon we getting another Valve game for free for saying sorry.
 
Disclaimer: Steam Database is not affiliated with Valve in any way. We are a community run website.

An hour ago, Steam users started seeing incorrect information on the Steam Store, as if they were signed into someone else's account.

There is no official confirmation from Valve yet, so we can only speculate as to why this issue happened. Valve is known to use Akamai as their CDN and Varnish for caching. Our theory is that a caching misconfiguration in one of these components has caused Steam to incorrectly serve rendered and cached pages intended for a single user only.

This issue means that users’ private information such as email address, billing address, and sometimes credit card details are at risk. As far as we know, this issue is read-only, and no one is able to perform any actions involving your account on your behalf.

To protect yourself, we strongly recommend completely avoiding visiting any Steam store links. This includes visiting the Steam store using the Steam client.

This is not a hack or a DDoS attack. This is highly likely to be a misconfiguration in one of Valve’s caching layers.

At the time of this writing, the Steam store is inaccessible. We can only assume Valve is currently working on fixing the issue.

If you used a PayPal account and had the details saved, you can unlink your account by logging on PayPal.com and going to Settings and Preapproved payments under the Payment options heading.

Going forward, we strongly encourage you not to store your billing information on the Steam store. Valve have proven multiple times that they’re unable to keep their security standards to a high level.
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Source
 
For those that want a synopsis:

Good new: Probably no credit card information has leaked
Bad news: Most of your personal information has. Your name, address and phone number if you've used a credit card on Steam, and your email too. This is way worse than your credit card number being leaked, as this allows people to use social engineering to impersonate you.

Valve are going to get sued hard in the EU. The French consumer group is already on their ass, and this is not going to help them. Frankly, they deserve it. They've acted for years as if they're these small "indie" guys who can't afford proper customer support, yet they rake in billions a year from Steam. They've been blatantly anti-consumer, and for years have avoided dealing with regulations set by the EU. The fact they they don't even have a competent PR system in place to communicate with the 75 million affected user accounts just adds insult to injury. It doesn't even matter if this was a "hack", or if someone at Valve pulled the wrong lever. This has happened before in 2011, and again earlier in the year.

Valve needs to wake up. Spin off Steam as it's own company with a traditional managerial system. The current "everybody does what they want, no one has pre-defined roles" thing going on is not working. I wish they were a public company, I'd love to know where all the money is going.

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ffs, I wasnt aware of this, STEAM wouldnt log in for a couple of times, I thought might just be the load during the STEAM sale. Was able to log in 30 minutes ago...
Mine is showing my stuff and correct details.
 
Guess I called it when I said cache issue.

Update 4 (Final)
Valve has responded to our request for comment, sounding the all-clear and assuaging concern over account compromise. The company says that all systems have been restored, and a caching issue caused users to see account details that weren't their own. No further action is required from users, according to a Valve representative.

"Steam is back up and running without any known issues," we were told via email. "As a result of a configuration change earlier today, a caching issue allowed some users to randomly see pages generated for other users for a period of less than an hour. This issue has since been resolved. We believe no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information and no additional action is required by users."
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Now where is my free game to say you sorry, Valve?
 
AlphaJohn said:
Guess I called it when I said cache issue.

Update 4 (Final)


Now where is my free game to say you sorry, Valve?
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That's a weak ass statement from Valve. They didn't even apologise. You won't get anything. Also, the rep is incorrect as this went on for two and a half hours, not only one.

Viewing the Account Details page on Steam showed you as logged in as another user and allowed you to see their account details, including amongst other things the last 4 digits of their card number, their Steam account name and the email the account is attached to. You could also see people's name, full addresses and their phone number if they had saved that info with their CC on Steam.

There were also a few isolated cases of people being able to de-activate other users Steam Guard and having funds spent on Steam or on their Credit Cards. Valve is downplaying this. Some of those account pages got cached by Google cache too, and you can still view them.

Since e-mails were exposed, everyone should stay alert to possible phishing attempts. If an e-mail claims to be from Steam, exercise some caution. Definitely don't click on any links in the e-mail without checking them first.

EDIT: Compare this to how Nexus mods managed their data breach a few weeks ago. Some people got access to an old database, and they still did a big write up about it warning their users, and then a follow up a few days later. Then there's Valve, who basically had to have a response beaten out of them by journalists. Like a piñata.

EDIT: I guess I won the lotto. Just got several spam emails in my Gmail inbox about winning a lottery. I haven't got messages like that for 5 years, since I made a new gmail account. At least Gmail has a good filter. Thanks Valve. I doubt this is a coincidence. Anyone know when my **** enlargement pills are coming? :p
 
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I cant sign into my steam account, keeps pointing me to "SIGN IN". I have gotten this before, but browsing to a game or closing and opening STEAM fixes it. Not now though.

I've closed STEAM, clicked on the sign on, nothing, keeps asking me to sign in...

Looks other too, on reddit.

Certainly a rough year for STEAM...pity to see it experience all this. But...

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