Eve Online dev responds to server attack

By John Bedford Published 15 June, 2011

Taskforce mobilized to evaluate risk.

Jón Hörðdal, chief operating officer at CCP, has responded to last night's service outage with a statement on the developer's website.

"At 17:00 UTC today, CCP became aware of a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the EVE Online cluster and web servers," he wrote.

"Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 17:55 UTC, that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely offline while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed."

CCP also stressed that subscriber information - including payment details - remained secure and were unaffected by the attack.

"Further, we can also confirm that no personal details such as users' credentials or credit card numbers were exposed through this incident."

An update later in the evening revealed that attempts to flood the EVE Tranquility server with traffic had led to a further withdrawal of the game service, this time instigated by the developer.

While notorious hacker collective LulzSec wasn't named in the statement, the group claimed last night to have targeted the game, along with the log-in servers for indie favourite Minecraft.

CCP is continuing to monitor the situation, and have warned that Tranquility may be taken offline again should circumstances require it.

Picture of John.

About John Bedford

John is an MMO specialist with a particular passion for Eve Online. He once nearly went paragliding.

Read more articles from John by visiting the John Bedford archive page.

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Comments (24) Latest comment 11 months ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • coolbritannia #1 11 months ago

    Fast response, unlike: http://www.kotaku.com.au/2011/06/report-...

  • Shikasama #2 11 months ago

    "Taskforce" sounds so much more exciting and dynamic than 5 people sat in a meeting looking at each other and going 'WTF!?'

  • Kanselier #3 11 months ago

    Jón Hörðdal. I love the tree-looking symbol between the 'r' and the 'd'.

  • Murton #4 11 months ago

    Say goodbye to net neutrality folks. No way in hell any Government is going to force ISPs to offer an maintain a level playing field on the net if this is what's going to happen with it.

    Sadly most so-called politicians are incapable of understanding the further implications of these malicious activities so the chance of getting effective legislation to bring these so-called hackers to justice is nothing but a pipe dream. This combined with the almost zero interest in a global co-ordinated effort on just about anything means that if any Government did bring in effective legislation there'd be no way to actually prosecute as the jurisdictional arguments will prevent any charges from being brought in the first place.

    Also, coolbritannia: during the PSN outage you almost started to turn into someone tolerable in these threads, but now you're back to trolling after the banning of ChalieChan, coincidence or are you feeling the loss of your favourite sock?

  • Kelduum #5 11 months ago

    Kandelier - its the letter "eth", my favourite Icelandic letter though is Þ, the letter "thorn".

    Trivia fact: The Icelandic alphabet has no letter Z as it was removed in 1973.

  • overcorpse #6 11 months ago

    Coolbritania keep on trolling brother,I find it hilarious that someone has so much hatred for anything Sony.Dude you need to lose your virginity.

  • aplsin #7 11 months ago

    "effective legislation".. bah.. it's people like you who scream for MOAR LAWS at every inconvinience that are the cause of law-books being 10 times as thick as they should be and the need for fucking lawyers to translate them into human language. Just go punch the bastards in the face instead of screaming for MOAR LAWS!!!!!1111oneone
    Edited by aplsin at 15/06/11 @ 11:18

  • FladgeMangle #8 11 months ago

    Taking down EVE might prove to be bridge too far for these tossers.

    I love EVE and used to play it religiously. From my experience though, most of the other players were either boardroom sharks, too-clever-by-half geeks or out and out psychopaths, gawd bless 'em. Not a group you'd want to piss off on in a cyber conflict.

    Fingers crossed for a targeted podder backlash.

  • Spekingur #9 11 months ago

    Taking down Eve Online and Minecraft just isn't a good idea...

  • layleeloo #10 11 months ago

    I wish all these hacker fuckwits would get a life, or get a job!

  • layleeloo #11 11 months ago

    No surprise at the other fuckwit with the first comment. Is anyone else bored with his obvious arse bandit trolling. Time to hit the ignore button. Ahhh bliss

  • persus-9 #12 11 months ago

    @Spekingur: Indeed, two games I would not want to mess with. Minecraft's fanbase seems to be every other geek in the world so their potential information network is huge and EVE Corps are seriously organised and likely to turn nasty over lost revenue. If I were a hacker then I'd fear a serious EVE Corp a lot more than I would any bunch of security staff Sony could put together. If they take it down again I reckon some of the big Corps should put together an ISK bounty to be paid to whoever catches LulzSec.

  • Kanselier #13 11 months ago

    Thanks Kelduum, I never knew :) Sounds interesting, might try to learn the basics.

  • Murton #14 11 months ago

    aplsin - don't presume to tell me anything about my character. I'm a strong advocate of civil liberties and an outspoken opponent of inappropriate laws, but like any right minded citizen I'd like to see new laws brought in effectively and swiftly where situations demand them. We currently have a huge spate of cyber crime going on around the world right now and while under current laws it is recognised as a crime there is no practical way of pursuing it because the laws pertaining to it are hideously out of date and there is no sharing of jurisdiction on global crimes other than war crimes and other acts covered in the UN Charter and Geneva Convention on Human Rights. This effectively means that all this hacking is effectively without consequence.

    I'd suggest you steer clear of debates you're not capable of participating in to be honest anyone who doesn't see the need for robust global legislation on cyber crime lacks the necessary understanding to discuss it logically and rationally and therefore has rely on poorly constructed reactionary arguments such as the one you just made.

  • coolbritannia #15 11 months ago

    Disagree Murton, the emphasis here should be on these companies upping their infratsructure to cope with these attacks, rather than legislate the fuck out of the internet.

  • Ryboy #16 11 months ago

    Hay, FailSack, why don't you do something fucking useful like hacking into every major bank and wiping all our debt?

    Bunch of fucktards.

  • Nephirion #17 11 months ago

    What were the servers doing in 0.0 security?

  • Velios #18 11 months ago

    I had a quick look at Lulz website and twitter feed, what an absolute bunch of little snot nosed pricks they are. Truly pathetic and need to get there asses kicked big time if you ask me.

  • ircaddicts #19 11 months ago

    Lets hope thier is next traget is wow/blzzard.

  • Spekingur #20 11 months ago

    My guess is that they targetted Eve Online and Minecraft due to their ties to Sony (Dust 514 exlusive on PS3 and Minecraft Pocket Edition currently a timed exclusive on a Sony Ericsson phone).

  • Murton #21 11 months ago

    "Disagree Murton, the emphasis here should be on these companies upping their infratsructure to cope with these attacks, rather than legislate the fuck out of the internet."

    And you show your lack of understanding in matters of security. No organisation can fully insulate itself against these attacks, someone will eventually get in or the attackers will move to smaller/softer targets. Prevention is of course the best cure, but that doesn't negate the need for some way of dealing with things after the event. Bearing in mind that proper laws to give consequence to these actions would be a preventative measure in themselves.

  • scoop #22 11 months ago

    Nothing to do with the Dust514 exclusive, and Minecraft Xperia Play initial mobile exclusive, of course.

    Don't think I'll announce any Sony partnerships for the time being...:p

  • BlinkeredAxis #23 11 months ago

    Lulz have opened a telephone hotline , inviting people to suggest sites to ddos (see BBC news tech page).

    Can anyone here suggest a deserving target...

  • BritishBlue1 #24 11 months ago

    @BlinkeredAxis

    <a href=http://www.chestnutcatsanctuary.co.uk/Content/sanctuary-charity-store>Here's one for you</a>