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Second Life Hit By Massive In-Game Worm

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the don't-touch-that-ring dept.

An anonymous reader writes, "At 2:46 CST today, the game Second Life was hit by a massive attack by a rogue programmer. Spinning gold rings began to appear in the air and on the ground, and as users interacted with them they began to chase and replicate. Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before and this invoked a worm script that was designed to multiply and spread across the 2,700+ servers run by Linden Labs in California, the game's owner. Many of the six hundred thousand active users experienced serious lag and lost connectivity to the servers, making it one of the largest known denial-of-service attacks in an online game. Linden Labs had to invoke martial law and lock out all logins by users except their staff as they began the task of cleaning the servers of what they began to term 'the grey goo.'" Comments in the SL blog entry indicate that Linden Labs had already deployed a "grey goo fence" before this worm struck, but someone found a hole in it.

3 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. And it was just getting good by jibjibjib · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A few weeks ago I was hearing things about SL like that corporations were holding press conferences there, businesses were running there and making good profits, and its economy was worth millions of dollars. I thought SL was just beginning to become important, and show the world that a virtual economy was a viable idea.

    Now we have CopyBot and grey goo and it seems like SL is just another dodgy online game after all.

  2. What? by JimXugle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What? No Screenshot from anybody?

    --
    -jX

    Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
  3. Re:Someone please explain by TekPolitik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How does this work in these games that someone is ever allowed to inject a code that can run on someone elses session?

    Second Life users are able to create objects using a fairly complete scripting language. The scripts run on the servers, and an object can create more objects when somebody interacts with it. It "runs" in other peoples' sessions not because it's running on their system but because they're all viewing the same MMORPG environment.

    And to preempt your inevitable comment, yes, it is very lame. I can't believe people are paying ongoing fees (in US dollars) to hold land in this thing.