EVE Online goes dark to fight security breach
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EVE Online, the massively multi-player online Sci-Fi game, shut down for ten hours yesterday (Friday), after discovering a security breach.
In a statement posted on the site, Jón Hörðdal, chief operating officer of CCP, EVE Online's owner, said the company had "discovered an anomaly in the EVE Online Database indicating a potential exploit" at 10.25AM GMT. A couple of hours research later, the company decided that the best thing to do was to go "completely dark while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed".
The result? "An indication that one of our databases was being accessed through a security breach." The company detected three database actions arising from the breach, none of which "affected other users than the one doing the actions. We can also confirm that no personal details such as users’ credentials or credit card numbers were exposed through this incident:"
Some Reg readers have complained to us about being left in the dark about EVE Online going dark. We have also listened to mutterings about refunds being in order - the service costs UK members £39 for a 90-day subscription.
But it is easy to sympathise with CCP's action. "While some may feel that such a drastic reaction was not warranted," Hörðdal said, "it is always our approach to err on the side of caution in order to protect the players. We of course understand the effect and disruption this has had for our players and apologize for not having been able to explain to the community what was going on. In these cases it can often be counterproductive to containment to give out information while we are in the process of evaluating the scope of the problem."
EVE Online lit up the internet again at 22:00 GMT yesterday. ®
COMMENTS
Right thing to do, but tiresome
Under these circumstances, shutting the lot down was the right thing to do. No question otherwise, leaving it up with the risk of things getting worse would be foolish, I think we can all agree that.
Asking for their money back is also stupid. In cases like this, I do believe that the customers game time should be extended for the duration of the downtime. As loosing 10 hours of play is really a disgrace.
The reason I say this is simple. Eve has to be frank far too much downtime, a scheduled one hour daily down time, and extended downtimes in Eve are far form rare.
I have played EVE for some time now, and have seen so much downtime it's beyond a joke. For one thing, 1 hour a day takes the piss to be frank. We as customers are paying for 90 days or 30 (what ever) yet we are actually receiving 90 hours less than what we pay for. When you add all these ours together, you realize we loose quite a lot of time in which we are paying good money for.
To make things worse, the so called "1 hour" downtime is quite often more than an hour. Now a 5 - 10 minute restart of the servers is logical when you consider the daily traffic, but an hour? Takes the pure, unfiltered piss.
But back on point, in this case. DT was sensible and the right thing to do, but I stand against loosing 1 hour a day, every day on top of that.
Mine asteroids???
Seriously, who mines asteroids for minerals? Haven't you noticed that button to melt down your victims' stuff yet? I mined more in a couple of months in WoW than I ever did in years of EVE.
Respawning with full kit is for FPSes.
Eve Online
Yes I was slightly miffed at having no notice of what happened, but over the hours i began to piece to togther what happened. CCP did the right thing , call it damage limitation, can you imagine the outcry if some of has had stuff lost etc.
Eve O is unforgiving if u don't know what ur doing, but the rewards are pretty good
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