The Internet can be a dangerous place for popular online games. A few weeks after Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3 suffered an organized attack against its servers, developer CCP Games’ Eve Online is facing the same thing.
On June 1, CCP noticed that a distributed denial-of-service attack was targeting its Tranquility cluster. That server hosts both Eve Online and first-person-shooter Dust 514. CCP decided to take down this server.
“Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation,” CCP chief operating officer Jón Hörðdal Jónasson wrote in a company blog. “At [8:07 p.m. Pacific], that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while we put in place mitigation plans.”
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
During that down time, CCP discovered a vulnerability that it patched. The server is back online now, and Jónasson assures customers that their data was in no way compromised.
For the unaware, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is when a group or individual use multiple computers to continuously ping a server for response. This can sometimes jam a server, causing it to crash.
“Our teams will monitor the situation carefully in the coming hours to ensure that our services are accessible and that all customer data remains secure,” wrote Jónasson. “We will be looking at ways to compensate players in both Eve and Dust for the outage and expect to announce what that compensation will be very soon.”
