Sometimes being a hacker pays off, and it definitely has in the case of Artem Moskowsky.
Moskowsky calls himself a “bug hunter,” and he’s raking in some serious cash for his efforts to reveal and identif potentially detrimental flaws in systems like Steam.
Back in August of this year, Moskowsky discovered a pretty serious glitch within Steam’s framework, and it could have cost Valve millions.
The glitch enabled Moskowsky to generate limitless free keys for any and every game available on Steam, and he even managed to nab 36,000 keys for Portal 2 [via The Register].
Thankfully for Valve, Moskowsky wasn’t about to sell his secrets for the big bucks – he instead reported the glitch to them, and they offered him the tidy sum of $20,000 for his efforts.
Of course, the bug is now fully patched so sorry, no free games for you.
You can check out the newly-released details of the investigation and bug right at bug-bounty website, HackerOne.
The post on HackerOne confirms the following: “Using the /partnercdkeys/assignkeys/ endpoint on partner.steamgames.com with specific parameters, an authenticated user could download previously-generated CD keys for a game which they would not normally have access.
“Audit logs were not bypassed using this method, and an investigation of those audit logs did not show any prior or ongoing exploitation of this bug.”
