"So I coded my own malware to steal CD keys in order to unlock the titles I wanted to play. "While I have a €2000 Steam account nowadays, at the time I couldn't afford to buy games," he explains. Rather than confronting the man, Gembe began asking him questions about the malware. By following the trail back, Gembe was able to track down its operator. This led him to an IRC server from which the malware was being controlled. But instead of scrubbing the malware and forgetting about it, he reverse-engineered the program to see how it worked and what it did. The young German soon realised what he had installed on his PC. It was an sdbot, a popular general purpose malware at the time." "It was a program that pretended to be a Warcraft 3 key generator and I was stupid enough to run it. "I got into hacking by being infected myself," Gembe says today. If it wasn't an inside job, how the hell did it happen? Did someone have access to Valve's internal server?īut the question which rang out loudest of all was the one anyone who has ever had something stolen from them cannot push from their mind: who did this? Anticitizen One How had this happened? Had the leak come from within Valve? Which member of his team, having given years of their life to building the game, would jeopardise the project in the final hour?
Such a leak was not only financially threatening but deeply embarrassing.Īfter a few moments pondering these immediate concerns, an avalanche of questions tumbled through Newell's mind. Half-Life 2 was going to be late, and Newell had yet to admit how late. The game had been due for release a couple of weeks earlier but the development team was behind. The town of Schönau im Schwarzwald, where Gembe was living with his father in 2003. Seven months earlier, on 2nd October 2003, Valve Corporation director Gabe Newell awoke in the large American city of Seattle to find the source code for the game his company had been working on for almost five years had leaked onto the internet. "You are being charged with hacking into Valve Corporation's network, stealing the video game Half-Life 2, leaking it onto the internet and causing damages in excess of $250 million," came the reply. Do not touch the keyboard," were ringing in his ears. Automatic weapons were pointing at his head and the words, "Get out of bed. At 6am on 7th May 2004, Axel Gembe awoke in the small German town of Schönau im Schwarzwald to find his bed surrounded by police officers.
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