Second Life Attack Throws Avatars Sky-High

[Colwyn]

Second Life Attack Throws Avatars Sky-High on Clickable Culture (http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/second_life_attack_throws_avatars_sky_high/)

Yesterday evening the virtual world of Second Life ground to a halt, due a deliberate, user-created software attack. Like previous attacks, this latest was launched from within the virtual world itself, relying on self-replicating objects to overwhelm Second Life's servers. Unlike previous attacks, the self-replicating objects were scripted to emit shockwaves capable of throwing avatars high into the air. The outage took about seven hours for the world's maker, Linden Lab, to fully recover from. A cluster of similar outages last year resulted in Linden Lab deploying a giant firewall to contain affected within 45 minutes of the launch of the attack. The company doesn't appear to have used that containment method this time.
Attack of the Red Helix on Second Life Herald (http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/04/attack_of_the_r.html)

Source: n3rfed (http://n3rfed.blogs.com/)

[Colwyn]

Will Second Life Ever Be Safe? on 3pointD (http://www.3pointd.com/20060417/3pointd-security-will-second-life-ever-be-safe/#more-126)

Another Denial of Service Attack / Hack on Linden Lab's Second Life MMO on PlayNoEvil (http://playnoevil.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/380-Another-Denial-of-Service-Attack-Hack-on-Linden-Labs-Second-Life-MMO.html)

Part of the problem may be the underlying model that has informed Second Life from the beginning. The model is based on valuing real-estate as the sole element of the world/game that Second Life meters and charges for. This has had a curious effect - it means that the game does not naturally charge people for processor usage and storage space. This means that a replicating script is "hard" for Linden Lab to see.

Source: MMO Portal (http://mmo.portalsnetwork.com/)