News > Xmas day attack on Second Life
December 29, 2006
Content taken from Gamespot:
Recently the flourishing virtual economy of online community Second Life produced its first real-life millionaire, estate agent Ailin Graef, and announced it had reached the one million member mark.
However, all's not entirely well in the virtual world--a series of "grey goo" attacks from malicious users over the last few months have been invading the system while Linden Lab technicians have battled to fix the problems and restore the world. One attack in November led to a temporary loss of service.
This latest attack took place at 9 p.m. PST on December 25, and was entitled "Christmas Present." The worm spammed an obscenity at random Second Lifers, while self-replicating itself as objects that appeared to be green genitalia wearing festive Santa hats. They were making a noise that might have been intended as laughter.
According to the blog MMODump.com, "40 minutes into the attack, many regions on the mainland have ground to a halt." Linden Labs made a statement at 9:10 p.m. saying that it was aware of the problem.
Jeska Linden then updated the Official Linden Blog at 11:15 p.m. to announce that the problem had been fixed. It read, "I’m pleased to report that the earlier issues are almost completely resolved and those regions which were disabled during the replication attack are being brought back up. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Christmas."
