Good and bad news in CS:GO

The world of Counter Strike is one of the most prominent in the video game community. The popularity of the title that was born in 1999 as an alternative modality of Half-Life never fell, and even today it is one of the most outstanding sagas of electronic entertainment.
So far this year the latest news about CS:GO has been as good as bad for Valve's 2012-born product. They first had a great month of overcoming the number of users playing the title at the same time, but then they saw each other. affected by a major threat to the data protection of their followers.

A million thanks

To measure the success of a game one of the most important points is to know how many people play it. Although Counter Strike is an icon of the gamer culture of recent years, the number of CS:GO users is far from falling and in March it broke a new record.
The measures taken to control the progression of the coronavirus pandemic led people to find themselves unable to leave their homes. The policy of social distancing and confinement negatively affected many sectors of the economy but favored others. One of those who took advantage of the situation was the video game sector, CS:GO is an example of this.
In mid-March the title that pits terrorists and counter-terrorists registered 1,007,062 players simultaneously on its servers. This number exceeds 120,000 people to the peak reached in February.
The brand places CS:GO in third place on Steam (the most important platform for computer games) behind PlayerUnkown’s Battlegrounds and DOTA, which registered 3,257,248 and 1,295,114 million users at the same time, respectively.
From the official CS:GO Twitter account (@CSGO), on March 14, they officially thanked all their followers with the message “Thanks a million”.

Security Filtration

After the joy over the news of CS:GO and its record for the number of online players, came worrying information related to the security of the title servers developed by Valve.
In April, the source codes for Team Fortress 2 and CS:GO were leaked. The flaw enabled users to execute commands remotely, threatening the protection of people's sensitive data. To achieve information theft, hackers could install programs known as malwares on other players' computers.
In a nutshell, the source code is the programming language instructions for executing the program. With these data available, computer criminals had the possibility of managing the software from their computers within the systems of other players.

The company's response

Faced with the delicate situation that arose around the security of CS:GO, the Valve company acted quickly to provide answers. On the official Twitter account, those responsible for the title shared the following message on April 22:

"We have reviewed the leaked code and believe it to be a reposting of a limited CS:GO engine code depot released to partners in late 2017, and originally leaked in 2018. From this review, we have not found any reason for players to be alarmed or avoid the current builds.”

They also maintained that they would remain active and alert to any potential danger and were made available to those users who had doubts or were affected by some type of problem. Also from the company, they warned players to always use CS:GO on official servers.

The latest news about CS:GO is as positive as it is negative. The milestone of exceeding one million players shows that the Counter Strike franchise, almost twenty years old, does not age even in the face of strong competition it has with rivals such as Fortnite or PUBG. However, the problems they went through with the dissemination of the source code, regardless of the fact that Valve has minimized them, should raise an alarm before a game that is responsible for the security of the data of so many users.