You may have heard, or been victim of the latest Modern Warfare 2 VAC ban wave that has been going down over the last week or so on Steam. People have been complaining all over the Interwebs and creating groups to voice their frustration about the unfair and seemingly random 12,000 MW2 bannings on Valves PC gaming platform. It was thought that those who have been hit by VAC would need to repurchase the game in order to play it again.

Well, as it turns out, affected users have been given an apology from Valve president Gabe Newell, their bans have been lifted. By way of apology affected users have been given a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2, plus another copy for gifting.

From his email: The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game. This wasn’t a game-specific mistake. Steam allows us to manage and reverse these erroneous bans (about 12,000 erroneous bans over two weeks).

We have reversed the ban, restoring your access to the game. In addition, we have given you a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 to give as a gift on Steam, plus a free copy for yourself if you didn’t already own the game.

Source:
http://www.mw2blog.com/