Unplanned Forum Downtime

Sunday evening Torley Linden's forum account was compromised using a vulnerability in one part of our web site code. The access was limited to her forum account and at no time was her in-world account compromised. At about 7:00 pm Sunday night we disabled the forums until we could better assess what exactly had occurred.

After a thorough audit, we discovered that seven Resident accounts had been viewed via the forum administrative site during the attack. We will be contacting these seven Residents directly in order to discuss this further, but please note that the only information available in the forum profiles are the email address and IP address. No other personally identifying information was available or disturbed and no other information was removed from the database.

We have rolled the forums back to a recovery point from Saturday afternoon. Any posts made between Saturday afternoon's backup point and Sunday evening will be lost.

We have also introduced stronger cross-checks when making account changes to ensure the security of our web site and prevent this from happening again. We're requiring password verification in more places when changing account information.

Thank you all for your patience while the forums were not accessible during the last few days. We apologize for any inconvenience the forum downtime may have caused.

To clarify, only in the case of the above mentioned seven accounts were email addresses and IP addresses made visible. We were able to track every page that was viewed during the attack.