Steam Detail Problems Behind Christmas Cache Issues

After an uncomfortable silence and much speculation from the more vocal corners of the internet, Valve have finally given some full details on what happened over Christmas. If you missed the news, some users were getting "My Account" pages for other users instead of their own. This was assumed to be an issue with caching but the only response that Valve gave at the time was confirmation that there had been an issue which was now resolved.

The issue was caused by a DoS attack causing more widespread caching to be required in order to avoid loss of service for users. Valve use third party partners to provide caching and it was one of these providers who made the error of setting everything to cache, not just non-personal information. 

Thankfully, they have conformed that there was not enough information revealed for anyone to lose out financially as credit card details were obfuscated. Some sensitive information such as email and postal addresses were shows. In total around 34 000 users were affected. This is anyone who viewed their account information between 11:50 and 13:20 PST on Christmas Day. You can view the full details from Steam on their news site.