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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?
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
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
...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.
Well, it was modded "redundant." Obviously everyone was thinking it.
Swi
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.
I found a screenshot over at Snapzilla.
BroadbandPig
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
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.
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.
Slashdot is an anagram for Has Dolts, and I am Dolt number 468543
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.