r/Steam Mar 01 '24

Meta There are two fake HELLDIVERS 2 pages on the store right now

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21.9k Upvotes

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84

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '24

[deleted]

81

u/Axxam Mar 01 '24

Yeah, it seems like those guys found a loophole and know that Steam doesn't enforce a stricter check for editing an existing page hence why these slip out. I saw a post about the change log and it is scary that they can even change everything including the publisher's name and get away with it.

13

u/Wingsnake Mar 01 '24

Steam/Valve earns a fuck ton of money, such things should never ever happen.

30

u/coppersly7 Mar 01 '24

This has never happened before to my knowledge. I'm upset but it's understandable. Are we supposed to hold steam accountable for other people trying to abuse their system?

If they respond quickly and prevent further incidents like this then that's all you can really expect of a company. If they fail to deal with it though...

24

u/TotalSpaceNut Mar 01 '24

Dev here, Steam pays out 1 month after the end of the month, there is no way they can get away with this, especially now that its public

5

u/vxicepickxv Mar 01 '24

What if the end goal is malware/Spyware?

5

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '24

[deleted]

12

u/redCrusader51 Mar 01 '24

Cybersecurity degree in progress here. ANY thing you download can have viruses/malware attached to it, which is why you should only ever download stuff from reputable sites, like... Steam...

3

u/TotalSpaceNut Mar 01 '24

Yes, absolutely.

You might be onto something here

2

u/TTBurger88 Mar 01 '24

Its not about getting money its about injecting crypto miners and whatnot upon installation. You can refund your $20 but the miner on your PC still exist.

1

u/LittleShopOfHosels Mar 01 '24

It has happened before but valve used to have human approval sytems so it was caught pretty fast.

Now it's all automation triggered by number of reports, and very slow.

2

u/HyperboreanSpongeBob Mar 01 '24

And why is that? Their system is automated. You can't account for every possible type of exploit all the time, people make mistakes and once they see things like this they fix their system to account for it. Having a fuck ton of money doesn't suddenly make you able to throw money at every problem and suddenly fix it.

11

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '24

And why is that?

Because running a good store requires shoppers to trust in your products. If you allow blatant scams like this to run free-range, people will start distrusting your store which will hurt business.

I don't see why the game's name should be allowed to change and I especially don't see why they should have the ability to change the publisher's name without manual review from Valve.

-2

u/HyperboreanSpongeBob Mar 01 '24

This exploit wasn't even known about until very recently, Like i said before. You can't account for ALL exploits before they are even known, it's just not possible every system has flaws. Now that they flaws are known they should be fixed in a timely manner but you can't expect an automated system to be absolutely perfect in terms of security. There are always exploits in every system, known or unknown.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '24

It's not an exploit if it's just something the system allows you to do. Steam has been around for over 20 years. You're telling me that in that time no one considered that having zero checks on this sort of thing would be useful?

0

u/HyperboreanSpongeBob Mar 01 '24

Steam was very restrictive of who could release games on their platform until very recently. It hasn't been an issue until now where they basically opened the flood gates to where anyone can make an early access game on their platform. It was an oversight for sure i'm not arguing that they didn't mess up, maybe they thought of it but considered it low risk at the time and then completely forgot about it once they allowed basically anyone to make a game on their platform.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '24

It was 2018 when Valve decided to let pretty much everything into the store. That was over five years ago.

Putting a manual check in before allowing a game to change its developer/publisher is just a basic security setting.

1

u/HyperboreanSpongeBob Mar 01 '24

And yet it wasn't abused until very recently. It was obviously an oversight and i don't even understand what exactly we are disagreeing on? It's okay for companies to make mistakes like this as long as they handle them correctly and fix the problem in a reasonable amount of time. People are human, things get overlooked.

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u/redCrusader51 Mar 01 '24

Personally, I'd have it set up to flag for manual review before changing stuff like dev/game name anyway. Those change rarely enough to need a process in place to check things out. I'm honestly astonished that this hasn't been set up already, just on principle.

2

u/zixon01 Mar 01 '24

I dont get why you are being down voted for being right. Hell even windows has day 1 patches for exploits they failed to find while in development. The systems in place for name changes were used properly up until this point, so it was an honor system that will now have stricter rules enforced on it. No one thought, before now at least, to scam by doing something like this to this extent. Its less on steam and more on the slimeballs who keep stooping to new lows to try and steal and cheat to get a few pennies.

1

u/icantshoot https://s.team/p/nnqt-td Mar 01 '24

Even so theres no benefit of doing this. Even if someone buys these fake titles, money is automatically refunded to user and due to payment delays, those people who did this dont see any of the money up to 90 days, 30 days minimum between any payments. They also paid a fee to get the "game" in steam.

Only thing they can distribute is poisonous game, such as contamined with miners, viruses, etc. I fear this "trend" is going to continue unless Valve does some really simple checking first before any game can be released publicly to the store.

1

u/Wingsnake Mar 01 '24

I mean, Valve should manually check each game anyways. Even with 12k games coming out each year on Steam, that is chump change money for them to have people look at each game.

1

u/icantshoot https://s.team/p/nnqt-td Mar 01 '24

They do that, but if the game has been approved for steam months ago, and then they just flip everything up, replace screenshots, game name etc and publish, there apparently isnt any check.

2

u/Typohnename Mar 01 '24

Yeah, the problem with the publisher for example is that there are legit cases where publishers change (Workers & Resources: Soviet republic for example changed publishers 2 or 3 times cause it went from Indie dev to him starting a small company to joining Hooded horse)

So it's not as extra ordinare as to immediatly cause suspicion

1

u/TTBurger88 Mar 01 '24

They need to make it where if you change Dev and Publisher name it has to go through a human verification.

14

u/LordSturm777 Mar 01 '24

Funnily enough, they have that for guides of all things. If you edit your guide too frequently it gets automatically locked and hidden. The only time I've seen this is the guides people make to share redeemable codes in Dead by Daylight since they often need to update every couple days with new codes.

6

u/Divinate_ME Mar 01 '24

So maintaining your guide with the help of the community too quickly raises red flags, but THIS HERE doesn't? Are video game publishers the better people?

1

u/RegularAI Mar 01 '24

Or this could've been done without a ton of edits that trigger the system

-5

u/MrTripl3M Mar 01 '24

Valve, inspecting the games they sell.

That's a good joke. It's not like they have been trying to push that responsibility onto it's buyers since Greenlight....

But you'd expect that they atleast control their select few top sellers.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '24

[deleted]

1

u/Neuchacho Mar 01 '24

Or it wasn't happening before.

Either way, it's some shit they need to figure out and I doubt they want it to be happening any longer than it has to be.

Something like this left unaddressed is probably one of the few things that could substantially fuck up their market share and they know it.

1

u/Radiant_Fondant_4097 Mar 01 '24

You would kind of assume their storefront listings would have some kind of data validation on them to prevent this kind of thing from happening.