Recently 2 famous FPS games, Counter-Strike Global-Offensive and Team Fortress 2 experienced a source code leak when it was found first posted on /v/ board on 4Chan (an Anonymous imageboard website).
This leak has caused much tension and speculation in the communities of respective games with instructions on Reddit asking users not to play the games online, especially on non-official servers as it will almost definitely get them a Malware.
For those of you not aware of what source code is what can be done with it. Source code is a readable form of code in which the game was actually written, commercial games are usually developed as proprietary closed source software products with the source code treated as a trade secret (- Wikipedia). The source code may be written in compiled languages like Java or C or interpreted languages like Python or usually the industry-standard C++.
People with source code of a particular game can get a better understanding of how the game works, additionally, they can also modify the game creating it possible for cheaters to alter their game or hacker to remotely execute the code and transfer malware.
Valve has responded to this: – saying the leaked source code is that of an older version of the games which were leaked in 2018 and that there is no reason for concern, especially as long as people are playing the latest builds and playing on their official servers.
CS GO and TF-2 are immensely popular multiplayer games with the latter having a player count of around 1 million and the latter being a part of Steam’s esteemed Orange Box. While Valve is showing minimal concern in regard to this leak, the community is still quite skeptical of it.
