What is Virtual World Damage?

Ran across a new private access Island Owner who's sim was re-aligned by some outside web-based attack that destroyed the terraforming and knocked her builds out of wack this weekend. Island was rollbacked and wiped clean - then taken off line. Official parties involved are using terms like 'virtual world damage', 'illegal and damaged sim virtual grid', 'hackers ISP banned'. And even talk of financial compensation in the amount of $750 USD to the owner of the island for the inconvenience.

When companies offer that kind of money I tend to get worried. Hopefully they closed this hole permanently. I do hope some real information on how this happened comes to light this week.

Anyone have a clue how this could happen?

even if we did its not right to announce it on the forums so any script kiddy with an itch can blast a sim

and if one did it could get you kicked off the boards

Thanks Osgeld. Whatever you said.

This goes way beyond script kiddy. Sounds like a hole in security for the grid. In line with the CC info hack that we endured a few months ago.

Perhaps it is best to let the Lindens deal with the problem as they see fit and not jump to any conclusions. Peace, love and happiness my friends )

Famous last words.

http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e298/bladyblue/wildlifemonkeys-hearnoevil-seenoevi.jpg

These forums are for discussing SL using only AUTHORIZED terms. What is considered "authorized" is at the whim of the moderator and shall not be discussed in these forums. Fear is your friend. Talking about forum censorship or going wildly off-topic will result in a ban and the forum topic being clos... (carrier lost)

But seriously (and to stay on topic), this is how it happens: BOOM! Crash, (ruuumble) blubba-blubba-blubba. YAAARGGGH! Woot-woot-woot flubba flubba. pshhhhweeeeeeee... Blip!

Screams and lamentations follow shortly afterward.

Hope I haven't revealed any trade secrets. Keep it under your hat commarade.

I've never heard of anything like this ever being the result of a "hack".

What it has always turned out to be is someone either obtaining the password of an account with edit permission, by social engineering or brute force or whatever method, or becoming a group officer with a position that allows edit permission, and then doing the damage with normal edit tools.

I suppose there's a first time for everything but in my experience there's often an initial cry of "hacker! bugs! security holes!" and then actually it turns out to be something very simple and not a hole in SL at all.

edit: either that, or there's a non-malicious but damaging SL error, which, given the state of the asset server recently, doesn't exactly sound impossible.

a LONG time ago there was a very bad script disguised as a freebie package where if you rezzed it, the entire sim re-teraformed to it's highest settings destroying the entire build. Usually it just took a rollback to before the attack to fix, no need to wipe it clean. This sounds much worse. Though with the compensation of $$ that makes me think it was a LL error.