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Second Life Hit By Massive In-Game Worm
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.
Now what they need is some sort of illness that affects characters temporarily, just like real life! Imagine, your character gets a cold and slows down and sneezes every once in a while. Or hey, you go kiss another character (if that's possible) and your character gets infected with herpes! Wouldn't that be fun? Oh wait - that was me last weekend. Damn.
Yeah, pointless acts of mass malice have come to Second Life. Now it really IS just like the real world.
Proof that all it takes to kill the Internet is something shiny.
First off, there were only about 14,000 people on the system at the time, not 600,000 as indicated in the summary. Second, while they did lock out new logins, it should be pointed out that any user who was currently online was not kicked off - and the period of "martial law" lasted about 20 minutes.
Of course, if there were 600,000 users on at the same time, the "game" would be unplayable - it's tough enough when it gets over about 10,000 right now.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Second Life as the worm turns.
Now we have CopyBot and grey goo and it seems like SL is just another dodgy online game after all.
This sounds like horseshit. It's like something you would see in a factually absurd hollywood movie about a programmer uploading a virus into the power grid. How does this work in these games that someone is ever allowed to inject a code that can run on someone elses session? Why would they allow that. Spining rings appearing in my session from some one elses code and my computer runs the code if I touch them. Praise Tron. I assume there is some explanation for this but since I'm not a gamer I am without a clue.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What? No Screenshot from anybody?
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
Wow, so now they're blaming it on a "worm"... ok. SL is like watching an MMO flipbook, the packet-loss is phenomenal while they continue to supposedly attract corporations and live-weather map projects, host in-game advertising and I'm sure making money off people somehow with Linden cash transfers. Buy some freaking servers, or get rid of the 2,700 solar-powered calculators currently running the thing.
I'm fighting The War on Drugs!
This reads like something from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash".
I never thought we'd get real systems vulnerable to attacks with 3D visual components as an integral part of the attack. This is much closer to SF than expected.
Is there a video?
Wow, talk about reality imitating art. Or, art imitating art. Or technology imitating art. Or the virtual imitating the virtual.
Annnyway, this sure brings me back a few years. The first time I read Neuromancer, I thought, "Damn, what would it be like to live in a world where interacting with computers is so visceral?" We haven't developed networked, immersive 3d environments, but we've sure come a long way from the days when just getting on the Internet from home was a major accomplishment.
I'd say this attack is proof that no matter how creative and interesting and fun an environment you create, there's always going to be someone out there who will put a lot of time and effort into pissing in it. I'm sure the creator of the worm has some sort of wonderful rationalization, of course. I wonder, is it worse to attack networks in the name of profit (or patriotism), or to do so just because you can?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Hey Kid, Want to try some Snow Crash?
This thread is worthless without pictures.
Does anyone have screenshots of the alleged "grey goo"?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Nice hack. Kudos to whomever pulled it off. The videogame generation is in danger of becoming a legion of conformist, rule-following lab mice, conditioned to obey and consume, differentiated only by which Big Media corporation they swear allegiance to. It's good to see someone somewhere is sowing discord. Eris would be pleased, but then who gives a fuck what she thinks ;P
Like my Mom always used to say: "Don't take virtual candy from virtual strangers".
Table-ized A.I.
I was online when this thing was attacking, and it never seemed to get to my sim - I saw the notices, and the web notice that they'd locked things down to linden login, but they let anyone there stay. It was laggy, but that's not that unusual these days. At least with this one, the grid was never fully down (if you were already in or didn't get booted) and the Lindens were able to contain and clean it up pretty quick (unlike some of the marathon outages caused by goo of the past). Total offline time for this one was about 1/2 hour.
A clarification - even if there are currently ~600k active user accounts there are usually only ~10K or so online any given time of day.
Anyway, I'd say the overreaction to copy bot did more damage to SL as a whole than this thing did.
Yawn.
MSRP - Tax, Title & Licence Extra Your Milage May Vary
honey, we shrunk the secondlife-kids...
Jesus Saves
It looks like the admins now have a "second job"....
Sonic the Hedgehog!
I submit that anybody who posts to Slashdot about the other people's need to "get a life" should spontaneously explode from sheer force of concentrated hypocrisy.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Sonic and Tails!
- Shadow
This appears to be related, at least in concept, to problem which sometimes comes up in network protocol design, Sorcerer's Apprentice Syndrome, which results in a cascade of copies that eventually overwhelms the ability of the connection to transmit and route the duplicates. The term originates from the Walt Disney animated feature Fantasia where the Sorcerer's Apprentice (Mickey Mouse in the red robes and wizard hat) accidentally causes the mops washing the floor to increase via geometric doubling. One wonders if other MMORPGs are vulnerable to similar attacks.
...to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
Uh oh, I think SkyNet just became self-aware... of its Second Life account.
... and then they built the supercollider.
It's not just the content, it's also the presentation:
"...Linden Labs in California, the game's owner."
Do Second Life users also grab at modifiers that are dangled in front of them?
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Well, it was modded "redundant." Obviously everyone was thinking it.
Swi
"Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before"
You should be so lucky.
In snow crash, the visual component was being used to transmit information and reprogram computing machines, in that case the brain. It was an impressive leap of insight into interfaces and the nature of computing machines, not too different than the buffer overflows we've been plagued with since.
In the second life case, the visual component exists because pretty much everything in second life is required to have a visual component of some sort. In this case, the visual component of a ring existed soley as an icon would in an outlook express virus... "click here to infect your system!" And people did. The ring icon is not integral to the attack in any way other than as hot tennis players have been integral to attacks in the past.
Not to burst your bubble, but it isn't exactly a technological marvel.
The ______ Agenda
Take one look at some of the screenshots from that game and *boom* say byebye to your cerebral cortex. Think of the ugliest possible art stretched into three dimensions doing things that would make Japanese tentacle monsters say "Hey, that just ain't right".
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
If you get 100 rings do you turn into Super-Sonic? ^_^
With 2700+ servers they have a hard time handling more than 10k users? Less than 4 users per server is tough enough? Um, I think there's Opportunities here.
--
*Art
on a related note, why can't we moderate stories as "-1 posted by an idiot"?
The Second Life marketing department have been very active recently.
This story smells funny.
These days playing Second Life with talking animals in sexual situations is bound to give you a virtual STD. Actually I am kind of surprised the first in-game worm is not transmitted though sex between players. That would create a nice Linden buck market in virtual condoms.
Apparently you are unaware of the millions of CS kiddies who cry when the Steam servers go down, but maybe that is not getting huffy either.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Given a complex enough virtual world, Heisenberg uncertainty principle will manifest itself through small variation in timing between different events, if not outright hardware glitches.
you go kiss another character (if that's possible) and your character gets infected with herpes
Genitals are manufactured objects in Second Life, but your normal face's lips are not, so genitals will almost always carry scripts of their own.
This means that kissing another character is unlikely to be a vector for viral infection, but there's a related activity that could easily do this.
Incidentally, waxing your carrot can of course trigger any scripted action in the object, so climax can be rather more visually impressive in Second Life than in your first one.
The first time I saw something like that happen it was really bad. Performance was very badly affected, and the objects would launch people into the air, so the only thing that could be done was sitting (you can't be pushed if you're sitting) and talking until they fixed it. And after a while the whole grid had to be brought down for hours.
Now all that happens is that things slow down for a while, they close logins for a few minutes, and soon everything is back to normality. Some areas aren't even very noticeably affected, because object creation is disabled, so the stuff doesn't get to run on those sims in the first place. The only effect felt there is the degradation of the central servers.
While it's certainly annoying, it's not nearly the problem it used to be.
Under an hour from recognizing the problem to fixed. If this were WoW, the servers would have been down 3 or 4 days!
I've been seeing an awful lot of stories about second life lately. First it was businesses opening virtual stores, then the copybot and now this. Is it all coincidence, or has Linden Labs been pushing their marketing campaign into high gear?
Spinning rings would be funny, an actual giant sandworm in Second Life would have been much more satisfying. No way would anyone want to go over and touch that.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
The problem is that the world is Zone Based, meaning each server is responsible for a equal size geographic portion of the world. The result is that processing power is spread evenly over the whole world. The problem is that people like to congregate causing some geographic areas to have more players, and other servers to have none. Where you have more players, you have more work for the server causing everything on that server to slow down. So the result is that the places players most want to be are also the places with the greatest lag. The unfortunate result is that many players have a negative experience right away.
Really, the whole server architecture needs to be reworked to behave more like a proper cluster, but that is too large of a change to ever consider implementing without starting over from scratch.
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This latest attack isn't the newest or most severe Second Life has experienced. In October 2006, a glut of attacks followed a vague "terrorist" threat uttered by self-replicating objects. In April 2006, three major attacks took place. Almost a year ago today, Linden Lab blocked a DoS attack by deploying a giant virtual firewall in-world, but I don't think that method is still used. Linden Lab had suggested earlier this year it would bring DoS attackers to the attention of law-enforcement agencies, but the results (if any) have not been publicized.
It would at least seem possible to make the zone size a server is responsible for variable, and then eventually, dynamic. That would look just like it scaled.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Real life" is just nucleons and electrons flying around one another according to a few simple laws.
The only reason anything is important is because we choose to attach importance to it. Whether it's a group of protons and electrons or ones and zeroes makes no real difference. If you think otherwise, you have a rather fantastical view of what's "real". (Your error is not in thinking that those ones and zeroes aren't "real" in the sense you mean it, but that you think anything else larger than a subatomic particle is. You're promoting one abstraction as being less abstract than the other, when in fact it's not -- it's every bit as much an invented construct in your mind, occuring no place in "reality" outside your mind.)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Ummm. . . VMWare ESX server clusters under the virtual Zone based servers? Maybe not even have separate clusters, but make all 2700 servers Virtual, run them in ESX cluster that is 2700+ servers, and let ESX handle the proper clustering? Would that work?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3