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Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms
- sbarre 14y agoImpressive hack, if that's what it turns out to be. I would guess that Blizzard has appropriate backups though.. WoW forums appears to be down too..
- tomjen3 14y agoYeah considering that they could have stolen millions of credit cards, this seems not that bad. Asuming they have backups.
- Ogre 14y agoDon't really need backups for that, death is not permanent. No one's going to lose anything but time and patience. Edit to add: Players who get killed by this aren't going to lose anything, which is what the link was talking about, but I guess its letting people who are in on it exploit content too - some of them may be rolled back, banned, or otherwise dealt with other than just the thing getting fixed, whatever it is.
- aidos 14y agoOT: dealing with the livefyre comments on that page on a mobile is a frustrating experience.
- theevocater 14y agoI am... very impressed. This is some pretty bad news for the current king of MMOs. I wonder if someone finally stole a GM's account or if this is a live hack. I'm more inclined to believe someone just made off with an account but hey crazier hacks have happened.
- jpxxx 14y agoI think that there's something kind of fascinating and romantic about the idea that an entire world and the ongoing social affairs of thousands of people can fit on a single server blade in the middle of nowhere.
- Alex3917 14y agoThis hack is eerily reminiscent of Morpheus coming to free the minds of all the people trapped in the matrix...
- adrianonantua 14y agoAmong everything I read in this thread, this was by far the most insightful.
- thornofmight 14y agoIt's probably against HN etiquette to say things like this, but I really love this post.
- bsphil 14y agoThat's what makes EVE so much more interesting to me. There's only one server. The monthly fee can be earned in-game. The economy is tied to actual dollars because it's so reliable. There have been plenty of universe-spanning conflicts that impact the entire game with genuine political drama, and the dev team steps back to let it unfold with minimal intervention.
- kahawe 14y agoAlso a lot of EVE is actually played outside the game... think about traders and crafters and their excel spreadsheets or websites put together for trade networks. And of course the spies! Their activities went so far as cutting an important fleet commanders electricity so his thousand-of-real-world-dollars titan could be shot down. EVE is fascinating!
- sonnyhe2002 14y agoI personally dont think it was a hack. I think it more likely a warcraft developer did something wrong and not an external hack.
- negamax 14y ago2012 - End of World.. of Warcraft. Mayans knew this.
- bravoyankee 14y agoAll joking aside, maybe this is what it's about?
- negamax 14y agoThat be pretty awesome imo
- blibble 14y agoapparently it's a client side hack for "WoW-plus", here's the ringleader on his own forums: http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-warcraft-bots-programs/wow-memory-editing/198650-screenshot-thread-94.html#post2535108 http://www.ownedcore.com/forums/world-of-warcraft/world-of-w... this isn't the first time Blizzard have messed up like this: they originally set the "Game Master" access level by a bit transmitted client side, and the same socket bit twiddling could be used to get into their private alpha servers...
- fchollet 14y agoHere's a video posted by one the script kiddies responsible for this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoM_sOC7jMA&feature=player_embedded http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoM_sOC7jMA&feature=playe... Nothing too impressive to this "hack"...
- djbender 14y agoprivate server...
- ChuckMcM 14y agoInteresting, if that is in fact related to this incident it suggests that they got a copy of the Game Master(GM) private key, they are activating GM only 'features' of the game. In this case the 'kill all' aura, another feature is to imbue your weapons/armor with arbitrary stats. Saw a character doing that in 2008 or so. No doubt this is related to this problem :http://kotaku.com/5933454/blizzard-network-breached-change-your-passwords http://kotaku.com/5933454/blizzard-network-breached-change-y...
- Ogre 14y agoThere was a plague in WoW in 2005 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident Could be a similar sort of thing, or it could be a hack.
- niggler 14y agoDebating whether to be impressed or disappointed that this has its own wikipedia article ...
- waterlesscloud 14y agoIt certainly raises some questions for the "notability" police.
- dangrossman 14y agoIt's a historical event that affected millions and spawned research in at least 4 distinct fields. The wiki article cites several scholarly journals on top of BBC, Wired, Reuters, NPR and The Times. How much more notable could you want?
- waterlesscloud 14y agoIt was a short-lived bug in a video game. There were research proposals that never went anywhere because it was concluded that the model would be a poor match for the real world. Plenty of things happen every single day that affect millions and are covered in multiple world news sources. They don't have their own pages, so clearly that's not the standard.
- dangrossman 14y ago> There were research proposals that never went anywhere Multiple published research papers, not proposals. Over 600 Google Scholar results. It also made its way into several books.
- tibbon 14y agoIf I remember right, there was a post on HN here a while ago about how there's a dot pattern embedded in all WoW screenshots, so they can identify who the user is even if they remove the character name from the screen. If they have the account information on this, I have to wonder if they could actually sue someone (instead of just banning them) for using this hack?
- ben0x539 14y agoThose screenshots are probably the victims', anyway. While Blizzard probably does have enough logging to track this down on their end, it's fairly easy to get a trial account with bogus account information, so it would be back to grabbing their IP addresses and pleading with some ISP to reveal their real identity.
- yozmsn 14y agoAs it turns out there are a couple of guys publishing videos youtube of their, POV as the attacker/killer, so if the dot-pattern thing isn't a hoax then those guys are screwed... but from what I read it sounds like it's a bunch of guys who are annoyed that the hack exists and so they're abusing it until Blizzard fixes it.
- aesopiate 14y agoThe dot pattern only exists in in-game screenshots, and only if they're set to 9/10 quality or lower. They won't exist in a frapsesque video.
- brador 14y agoIt's interesting to comprehend the amount of lives a hack like this will positively affect. How many will pick up a book, or go for a walk, now that they no longer have their go-to fix of virtual reality. How many WOW addicts will have time to think "never again" and follow through. Equivalent to all the cigarettes in the world vanishing for a few hours? Possibly. And equally as effective I say.
- TylerE 14y ago> How many WOW addicts will have time to think "never again" and follow through Somewhere between -infinity and zero.
- ben0x539 14y agoI think you severely overestimate the impact of in-game death.
- njharman 14y ago> How many will pick up a book, or go for a walk, now that they no longer have their go-to fix of virtual reality. Statistically, Zero. Trust me, they are all madly typing on forums, mashing refresh, trying to find out / talking about what happened. > How many WOW addicts will have time to think "never again" and follow through. A few.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoThey are not all blogging. Very few do. Millions of WoW players are lazy slobs, who are tweeting their friends "bummer man" and maybe, just maybe, going out for a movie or a walk or something actually, concretely social for a change.
- jmduke 14y agoI think it's impossibly difficult to argue that wasting time playing WoW is fundamentally worse than, say, watching football.
- EGreg 14y agoIt looks like there were some videos posted from the point of view of the hackers. Doesn't Blizzard put watermarks in each of the clients? They can track it to the licenses which people bought, and probably to the people themselves, no?
- josso 14y agoThe watermarks was only added, if you used the builtin screenshot-feature of WoW, and only if you didn't had it on quality-level 10 (max). So it won't work with videos and I guess that the hackers haven't used the builtin screenshot-feature, if they have released pictures.
- EGreg 14y agoThey could have rather easily added other watermarks, for videos, etc. There are lots of watermarking techniques that survive lossy compression.
- mtgx 14y agoAnd this is why making Diablo 3 work on servers, too, was a terrible idea (among other reasons).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- macspoofing 14y agoWhy?
- patio11 14y agoAdmin consoles: the soft underbelly of billion dollar software operations since... Seriously, though: you almost certainly have one if you run a software business. Client side SSH certificates are your friend. If you're not able to do that, because it is really annoying, separate it from the main app and lock it down as much as possible. (Separate authentication from the main site/app's authentication scheme. Lock down access, ideally at the network level. Strongly consider two-factor auth.)
- ChuckMcM 14y agoBlizzard does use client side SSH certificates according to a dev at BlizCon 2 I think. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd guess that someone laid off in [1] took some of the family jewels with them which enabled [2] and ultimately this as well. [1] http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/02/29/blizzard-announces-layoffs-of-600-employees-worldwide/ http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/02/29/blizzard-announces-l... [2] http://kotaku.com/5933454/blizzard-network-breached-change-your-passwords http://kotaku.com/5933454/blizzard-network-breached-change-y...
- lazyjones 14y agoThat's odd, Blizzard should be competent enough to revoke the certificates of former GMs (and have per-user certs, not shared ones).
- trafficlight 14y agoTake a look at Authy for a reasonably easy way to add two-factor auth to your normal SSH login. It's intended for website authentication, but there is a Github project for adding it to sshd. https://www.authy.com/ https://www.authy.com/ https://github.com/authy/authy-ssh https://github.com/authy/authy-ssh
- RossM 14y agoAlternatively, a solution using Google Authenticator.[1] [1]: http://www.howtogeek.com/121650/how-to-secure-ssh-with-google-authenticators-two-factor-authentication/ http://www.howtogeek.com/121650/how-to-secure-ssh-with-googl...
- sespindola 14y agoInteresting hack. As some of the MMORPGs have multi-million dollar economies, they'll need to increase their PCI level compliance. This reminds me of Charlie Stross's Halting State[1]. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State
- djbender 14y agoThere's no confirmation of a "hack." This is purely speculation.
- godseyeview 14y agowow the graphics are so ugly
- flexxaeon 14y agoThought "massive destruction" meant to the game infrastructure, or at least character data/inventory. This is kinda funny.
- nilved 14y agoYeah, there's no actual destruction here besides less than half an hour of a player's time.
- patrickmay 14y agoThere's more discussion and videos on ownedcore.com.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- lutusp 14y ago> Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms 1. Wait -- was I just teleported into my favorite South Park episode? 2. I can't wait to see the civil lawsuits for psychological injury against the perpetrator of this outrage. 3. Don't these people do nightly backups? It's not as though WOW isn't an important cybernetic resource meriting industry best practices.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Evbn 14y agoYes, they have backups and a precedent for doing rollbacks in response to bugs.
- ben0x539 14y agoJust to clarify, death in WoW is something that happens all the time. It's very unlikely that it causes anyone more than a minute worth of inconvenience in this case, and certainly less than it would to take the servers down to apply a backup.
- podperson 14y agoAnd here was I thinking it was caused by players leaving the game in disgust over the latest expansion. Oh well.
- lazyjones 14y agoit's fixed: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5616171565 http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5616171565
- beedogs 14y ago> Editor's Note: Please do not link to the source of these hacks. Any nefarious links will be removed, and repeat offenders will be banned. I hate this kind of crap.
- sageikosa 14y agoEpic level spell?