Second Life attacked (again)

Filed Under Second Life on 2006-11-20, 14:16

I’ve been on the road for the last week, moving to San Francisco, and haven’t had a chance to jump on Second Life. That’s not such a bad thing as I might not have been able to log in yesterday even if I had the chance. The griefers are back at it, trying to ruin everyone’s experience in Linden Land. A rogue programmer decided that Second Life needed to be a bit more Sonic the Hedgehogy and people started seeing familiar spinning gold rings appearing and replicating throughout the world. The worm quickly spread and Linden Labs shut off all logins for a brief period of time while they tried to clean up the servers.
You can’t help but start to think of Snow Crash when you hear things like this. Let’s hope that this provides even more motivation for necessary security measures to limit the impact of these attacks. With educational insititutions and large businesses making their way into SL, there will be more users, more traffic, more griefers, and a much greater need for some sort of control as far as the technical side of things.