Update: 3 million Dirt 3 codes stolen

I recently got a free code with an AMD 3850 and was wondering this weekend why it would not work on Steam. Could they have shut down all sorts of promotion codes for the time being? The automatic conversion from the code on the piece of paper to a Steam compatible code via the Codemasters promotional website seemed to work fine though.

Posted:A year ago

Ouch, I hope they can come out of this without bad consequences :/ Besides, since one can open a dummy steam account with fake name and all, tracking down who's using stolen codes and shutting their accounts down is not going to be too much of a deterrent.

Posted:A year ago

I see on Develop webiste that Kotaku had updated their article to say 250,000 codes may be closer to the actual number now.

Not sure why Codemasters would be storing the keys they send to Valve/AMD on a web server. There are more secure ways of sending the codes out to 3rd party.

Posted:A year ago

Barrie mate, you'd be amazed at the stupid things some people do with sensitive data... remember what I did before I joined EA :-)

Anyway, I would imagine that code blocks can be enabled and disabled, so that may happen here, or indeed they may let people redeem the codes and go from there - that's what I'd do, but then I'm a sneaky git :-)

Posted:A year ago

To CLARIFY for those who seem misinformed [from the poor wording of articles around the net];

Roughly 1.7 Million codes were left UNPROTECTED on an **AMD affiliated website**. The codes were to be used by AMD customers who purchased their products during the promotion. However the rocket scientist who set up the promotion clearly never saw the downside to storing all the codes in text files on the server accessible to all who knew the root url.

So don't bash poor Codemasters for the lapse in brain capacity here, despite their previous problems, this seems to be more AMD's fault.

Posted:A year ago

An official statement from AMD has been issued. [link url=http://www.facebook.com/AMDGaming
]http://www.facebook.com/AMDGaming
[/link]

"You may have heard this weekend, activation keys for free Dirt 3 game vouchers shipping with a few AMD products were compromised. The keys were hosted on a third-party fulfillment agency website, AMD4u.com, and were not on AMD’s website. Neither AMD nor Codemasters servers were involved.

We’re working closely with everyone to address the situation. AMD will honor all valid game vouchers, but just a heads up, the current situation may result in a short delay before the vouchers can be redeemed."

Posted:A year ago

Cheers, David. Guess that was quite a blow nonetheless.

I wonder at which point we'll have the stories checked back, though ... Been quite a few hasty news lately, which were to be corrected later-on ...

Posted:A year ago

I can confirm the delay. You might get your Steam code instantly (I typed it in on Friday), but it seems to take three days until the game actually starts, instead of pretending to start and vanishing from Ram without error (Monday evening the game worked).

Posted:A year ago

i wouldnt want to be one of those people who brought a AMD card only to find out my free copy of dirt 3 does work...

silly person who ever did the whole "lets store codes in txt files" thing.

Posted:A year ago