Valve Hacker Arrested

A hacker who gained notoriety by breaking into Steam in 2007 has been apprehended by Dutch police in the town of Maastricht.

Known as MaddoxX, the hacker was able to bypass Valve’s security in a third-party Cyber Cafe file server and access information including credit card numbers, transaction statements, Valve’s bank balance and other information. He posted the information in a message on the No-Steam forum, saying, “We also don’t want money from VALVe. We want a simple message on their site.”

According to the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, however, MaddoxX did not always demonstrate such magnanimity, claiming he had run through “13 million Euros playing poker online and shopping for notebooks, flat screens and MP3 players” before we was caught. A Shacknews report says that along with the Valve incident, the hacker is also being charged with breaking into an Activision server and downloading a pre-release version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

The arrest was reportedly carried out by Team High Tech Crime, although a Google translated Dutch website referring to the unit called it the High Tech Crime Team, which sounds somewhat less silly but also not nearly as funny under the circumstances.