Steam Have Caching Issues Over Christmas

Steam users had a brief moment of panic on Christmas Day, when a caching issue caused some users to see a cached version of someone else's Account Details page. There's not been any reports that any payment details were compromised (these are hidden at all times) however it does mean that email addresses and real names were revealed to random users. 

It would appear that what has happened is that Valve upped the amount of information that was put into cache memory, a temporary store to reduce strain on servers that have to put out the same content to many users. The problem is that ALL information was set to cache, including that which was specific to a user. The upshot of this is that for about an hour, Steam users would have seen the account info of the last person who viewed their account info page.

The good news though is that no accounts have been compromised. Your credit cards and Paypal details are safe, Valve have fixed the issue. The worst thing that may have happened is someone may have seen your email address. As long as that person doesn't run a spam mailing list, you should be fine.

Valve issued a press statement on the issues:

"Steam is back up and running without any known issues. As a result of a configuration change earlier today, a caching issue allowed some users to randomly see pages generated for other users for a period of less than an hour. This issue has since been resolved. We believe no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information and no additional action is required by users."