This week's raging controversy involves the of source code to a hotly anticipated game into the wild by an unknown cracker. The game, of course, is Half-Life 2, and its developer, Valve. Well, it seems that Valve has sprung a leak, so to speak...
At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
[...] Well, this sucks.
My analysis? The impact of the leak is overrated. While it's by no means a good thing, and is certainly a game developer's worst nightmare, this does not spell doom for Valve, nor is it going to ruin an otherwise hotly anticipated game. If anything, it is excellent publicity for Valve and their licensing programme, and may increase game/engine sales, is unlikely to represent a major threat to their intellectual property, and may even bolster game security. I'll briefly address these three aspects to the leak, explaining why it the leak is not the devastating blow that many commentators are making it out to be.