60 Second Life Users Banned Over Grid Attack
Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world of Second Life, banned 60 accounts this week over what amounted to two distributed denial-of-service attacks perpetrated on the same day. The attacks, which involved seeding the SL Grid with self-replicating objects which soon choked off processing power, forced Linden Lab to disable much of SL for long periods on Monday. Past attacks have shut the Grid down altogether. Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, reported the banned accounts in an audio Town Hall meeting held Tuesday.
“We do continue to be quite aggressive about banning and criminal reporting associated with Grid attacks,” he said. “We just banned around 60 accounts related to the Grid attack we had yesterday. We’re obviously very careful about privacy. We are as aggressive as we can possibly be about shutting down accounts where there are cases where people are obviously attacking Second Life and trying to keep other people from using it.” Most of the accounts banned were apparently associated with a loose group of Second Life residents known as the W-Hats, who have maintained a disruptive presence in Second Life for more than two years. More on all these issues in the next post, just wanted to get that facts, such as they are, out there for now.