Gabe Newell publicly explained the situation on fan website, (now ValveTime) forums and asked for help from the community to track down the hackers.
The source code for the Source engine on Octoand an unfinished version of the game on October 7 were leaked on the internet by a friend of Gembe. They had many developed branches that he couldn't even begin to check them all out. He only had the main development "trunk" of the game. The game didn't run on his computer, so he made some code changes to get it to run in a basic form. On September 19, 2003, Gembe downloaded the unfinished game code. That's when he found the source for the game. As the weeks passed, he realized that nobody at Valve had noticed he was inside the company's network. He found various design documents and notes about its creation. Gembe began to search for information about the game.
Once he had done that, he had full access to everything.
He was able to crack the passwords in no time. Valve's Primary Domain Controller had a username "build" with a blank password. Gembe had found an unguarded tunnel into the network on his first attempt. Valve didn't firewall this server from its internal network. In the port scan logs, he found a server which was in Valve's network range from another corporation named Tangis, a company specialized in wearable computing devices and was managed by Gabe Newell's brother, Dan. By transferring this data, he was able to discover the names of all the sub-domains of the company's web directory. It is also a protocol used by hackers to peek at a website's data. The network was secure from the outside, but their name server allowed anonymous AXFRs, which gave him quite a bit of information.Īsynchronous Full Zone Transfer (AXFR) is a tool used for synchronizing servers. He scanned Valve's network to check for accessible web servers where he believed the information about the game might be held. He wasn't expecting to get anywhere, but he succeeded at his first attempt by accident. In 2002, Axel Gembe, a young German programmer, whose favorite game is Half-Life, had the idea to hack into Valve's network to find something about the sequel.