Valve Paid $20,000 To The Hacker Who Identified Steam Free Games Generating Bug

Valve showed its gratitude towards the hacker who identified Steam free games generating bug. Artem Moskowsky, who describes himself as a “bug hunter,” bumped into a bizarre glitch on Steam that permitted him to generate thousands of free keys for every video game on Valve’s platform. Now, Valve paid $20,000 to Artem, thanking him for reporting the issue instead of using it for his own purposes.

It was August this year when Artem discovered the bug on the Steam platform. However, Valve representatives decided to reveal this situation this month, also announcing the media that they will pay Artem with $20,000 as a reward for reporting the glitch that would have permitted everyone access games for free.

According to Valve, the bug would have allowed hackers to take advantage of an error within Steam’s developer tools. Employing some “specific parameters,” every person who would have had access to those tools could have forced the system to release keys for the games on the platform.

Valve Paid $20,000 To The Hacker Who Identified Steam Free Games Generating Bug

Valve also conducted an investigation into this situation and concluded that no one had used the glitch to get free Steam games, and that’s excellent news for Steam’s owners since Artem reported that, in just a matter of seconds, he retrieved more than 36,000 unique keys for Portal 2.

As Steam is not at its first bug, as the platform faced many similar situations over the time, Artem Moskowsky made a career out of reporting bugs and glitches to Valve. In this regard, Artem also found a bug on the platform in July. Back then, Valve rewarded the so-called “bug hunter” with $25,000 for his work.

In total, in just about a couple of months, in July and August of this year, Artem Moskowsky managed to raise $45,000 for just reporting some bugs to Valve.