As a partial webmaster myself (that is, I run a website, not a professional at web services), nothing makes the belly chuckle like an anonymous person who is likely not old enough to drive, writing a comment threatening to hack (hax) the website and ruin my life. Often, such a problem can be fixed by simply adding the IP address to the auto-delete filter, and hoping that the young person isn’t posting from a school where other people might like to comment in the future.
On the other hand, one has to be cautiously apprehensive about website security. For every hundred script kiddies you knock away with your hardware firewalls, dedicated servers, and DDoS protection, there is at least one person out there who can, and will, break into your system if you piss him off enough, and although MMO Fallout is not a business, I can say nothing scares the pants off of business than the thought of having the IT guy come into their office and say “Someone got in, sensitive information has been leaked onto the internet.” So nothing puts a damp in your pants like seeing this message:
“Right now we have more than 3 Million and 5 hundred thousand accounts. 5 hundred thousand of them are already hacked and verified. Your other Games like Bounty Bay Online and Tera are affected too. So you better dont mess with us. Take this serious. Change your mind. Become a valued member of the community and stop abusing them.”
Frogster’s account security system was compromised, and although the number cannot be officially confirmed, the hacker behind the attack has released over two thousand account names and passwords. In a post on the official forums, Frogster Silberfuchs revealed that the two thousand accounts who were revealed have been deactivated, and are able to be reactivated by their owners.
We promptly assembled a task force and are of course making every effort to get to the bottom of this incident. We are utilising every means at our disposal to minimise the damage and to prevent such threats in the future. We have already implemented additional security measures today. As soon as all the necessary steps have been taken with regard to operational and criminal processes, we will inform you of further developments on this matter.
It is yet to be seen whether or not more accounts are going to be revealed, and by the time this story ends there could be a lot of deactivated accounts. The sad part is that, although this whole ordeal started because of something as simple as gripes with a gaming company, this will likely end with the hacker being prosecuted and (depending on his age) going to jail.
This is just a reminder: Breaking the law is not a proper response to your gripes with a company. Do you really want to risk going to jail over your anger that Frogster deletes too many critical forum posts?
MMO Fallout 