A user hacked Steam and discovered how to generate endless free games. For this, Valve pays him a big reward.
Valve’s Steam is probably the largest video game platform in the world, where thousands of games can be purchased and played. This makes Steam a worthwhile target for hackers looking to profit from it.
The glitch for endless games: Artem Moskowsky experiments a lot with Steam and repeatedly finds errors and glitches. As it became known, he found a bug in August that allowed him to make Steam spit out unlimited keys for all kinds of existing games. He reported this bug directly to Valve and received a reward of a whopping $20,000.
Developer tools were the problem: As Valve explains, Moskowsky exploited a glitch that anyone could access who used the developer tools of Steam. By using “certain parameters,” anyone with access to these tools could make Steam simply spit out endless keys for all available games.
Considering that nowadays individuals can quickly register as “developers” for Steam, the potential for exploitation was gigantic.
Funny bugs also exist in other games – in WoW it once caused “Super Loot”.
No one exploited the bug: Valve has since fixed the bug and completed the investigation. They concluded that no one had exploited this bug so far – except for Moskowsky, who found and then reported it. To test the bug’s viability, he tricked the system and ensured that he received 36,000 keys for Portal 2.
Bug hunter as a job: Moskowsky is now known for occasionally finding bugs on Steam and immediately informing the developer Valve about them. Just in July, he reported a bug that earned him another reward of $25,000.
Would you have been so honest and told Steam about the bug? Or would you have enjoyed a life of free games?
For those who want to legally snag cheap games: The dates for the next Steam sales have already been leaked!
