ah, i'm safe then. odds are if i go out im in full motorbike leathers and helmet with a tinted visor :P

I used to play WOW and would be really pissed off about this. Downtime in this sense is down to how much money you want to spend.

My landline has a full UPS style backup with redundant routing and multiple backups beyond that, my VOIP service has ( as Skype have shown) no battery backup, no UPS, below 3 nines uptime and a shoddy service.

MMORPG are relatively new, following the same pattern as telephone companies did (there were loads and then they all collapsed into google type/Ma Bell operations) and seeing that reflected into the internet. You can be really big at the start and still fall into nothing.

Free word of advice to large entities in a highly populated new world, may tomorrow be the same as today.

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3324

Ciao

The WoW setup is actually pretty sound and I don't see what relevance backups have in this case. Until they could find the exploit's cause the same users would probably just keep on crashing the servers when they brought them back up. As with all software crashes, finding a bug like this could take weeks. Even assuming every user's actions are logged, unless you're lucky there's going to be a lot of logs to look through, and the speed at which they fixed it, in my eyes, is pretty impressive.

I can understand user frustration, as I used to play WoW, but this response is actually a lot better than most other companies would have if they had similar problems. Kudos to Blizzard.

"It's unknown whether Blizzard can track down those who took advantage of the exploit" - don't you mean 'took advantage of the vulnerability'? The root cause seems to be crappy code - they are not checkng user input sufficiently if you can crash the grid by logging in.

For those too lazy to look it up, enter into your IPCHAINS:

deny from 222.184.0.0/13

That takes care of Chinanet-js (a well-known long-time hoster of malicious Web sites).

Hello, My name's Tim and I'm an idiot.

I payed £{Insert cost here, I don't know, I don't play the damn thing} to become addicted to a fantasy world to further diminish my REAL life. Thats fine. A lot of people don't have/like REAL lives.

What set me apart from the rest of the MMORPG crowd, and secures my title as the stupidest gamer on the planet, is that having paid to play this pile of pixels, I decided it would be a good idea to spend a few hours of my life researching an exploit to break what I have paid for.

Alas Tim isn't alone in this world, aparently there are a lot of mindless gamers out there.

It's like me buying a car and then tipping sugar in the gas tank, all the while wearing a T-Shirt embossed with the word: "l33t"