Dota 2 chat forum hit by hack attack

News of the hack hit shortly before the start of The International - Dota 2's global gaming tournament

The official chat forum for Valve's Dota 2 game has been hit by a hack attack, a security company reports.

Leaked Source said email addresses, user names and passwords for more than 1.9 million people had been stolen in the attack.

The passwords had been weakly protected by extra security measures, it said, and would be easy to crack.

The hack was revealed just as Dota 2's global tournament, The International, gets under way in Seattle.

More than $20m (£15m) in prize money is up for grabs for Dota 2 teams taking part in the tournament.

Account shared

Leaked Source said the attack, on 10 July, had only now come to light.

The data taken was protected or scrambled using the MD5 hashing system to which was added a random element - a process known as "salting".

Despite this, Leaked Source said it had been able to convert more than 80% of the hashed and salted records back to readable text.

More than one million of the 1.9 million records in the dumped database were for email accounts at Google's Gmail service, it said.

And a significant proportion seemed to be disposable email addresses simply used to sign up for the forums.

Game-maker Valve has yet to officially comment on reports of the attack and the theft of credentials.

Brendan Caldwell, a reporter at the Rock Paper Shotgun news site, urged forum members to change their passwords, even if they did not use the site much any more.

He also pointed out that the forums for Dota 2 were separate from Valve's larger Steam gaming service.

"So you've only got a problem with your Steam account if you use the same password for both," he said.