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10 Year Old Steam Bug Could've Allowed Hackers Total Control of Your PC

10-Year-Old Steam Bug Could've Allowed Hackers Total Control of Your PC

By Rishi Alwani | Updated: 1 June 2018 16:31 IST

Highlights

Steam had an exploit that existed for over 10 years
It has now been patched
It could have given hackers full control over your PC

A Steam bug could have allowed hackers complete control of your PC. The exploit was a cause for concern as it would mean all of Steam's users (in excess of 125 million) were vulnerable losing control of their desktops or laptops thanks to this and has now been patched. It was discovered by Tom Court who wrote about it in detail earlier in the week. Court is a security researcher at Contextis - a cyber security firm. While Valve hasn't commented on this development, it did thank Court by name in the release notes for the Steam client's April 4, 2018 update.

"Fixed a crash when packets in a UDP connection were malformed in a particular way. Thanks to Tom Court from Context Information Security for reporting this issue," the release notes read.

"This bug could have been used as the basis for a highly reliable exploit," Court wrote. "This was a very simple bug, made relatively straightforward to exploit due to a lack of modern exploit protections."

"The fact that such a simple bug with such serious consequences has existed in such a popular software platform for so many years may be surprising to find in 2018 and should serve as encouragement to all vulnerability researchers to find and report more of them," Court wrote.

In addition to this, Court also published a video on YouTube showing how this hack worked wherein in he launches a calculator app on the target’s system taking advantage of this bug which you can check out below.

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