Unprofessional Videogame Software and Hardware Support

have not posted anything for a while, thought this was rather fitting, been looking alot recently into how vulnerable steam is to malicious attacks (due to my massive paranoia of all things online) and i have always thought up till now that the only thing at risk from steam-based attacks, is your steam account itself (from keyloggers and whatnot) that you could only infect your machine if you are being an idiot and attempting to install 3rd party hacktools for steamgames (wallhacks, aimbots, that sort of rubbish that children like to download because it makes them feel like keanu reeves from the matrix for a brief period of time)

turns out i was wrong! there appears to be a small hole in steams security that could cause massive issues for your PC just from doing something as simple as clicking on a URL in your internet browser. (i am IN NO WAY promoting the idea that steam is an unsafe service to use, but i AM saying that you need to be observant of what links you click on, even outside of steam, even with steam not even running in the background)

heres what arstechnica had to say about it

''The vulnerability resides in the Steam Browser protocol, which is commonly used by websites such as the Steam Web Store to install, uninstall or launch Steam games and perform other common tasks, using URLs starting with "Steam://". By getting a user to click a link to a specially formed Steam URL, an attacker can remotely exploit buffer overflow bugs and other vulnerabilities in various Steam games and in Steam itself to create and run malicious code on a target's machine''

thats like the most basic description of it i could find, you dont have to be ultra-paranoid about it, just be wary of any links you click on while browsing the web that attempt to open steam (most browsers warn you when you click on a link that attempts to open another program on your computer)

if you are using a browser that does not inform you when a link you have clicked on is attempting to open another program on your computer, you can use the following advice:

If you are running Steam and using a vulnerable browser, you can protect yourself by going into the settings and disabling automatic launching of Steam:// URLs. If you're already using a browser that gives warning when URLs try to launch external programs, keep a special watch for any suspicious links that try to launch Steam.

link to the original arstechnica article:
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/10/steam-vulnerability-can-lead-to-remote-insertion-of-malicious-code/

link to the proof of concept video released by ReVuln (a video that shows how the attack works)
http://vimeo.com/51438866