Fractured Online Reports On Player City Restoration Following Last Weekend’s Hack
Dynamight Studios has brought order back to Fractured Online after a hacker deleted every player city in the game last weekend. Don’t expect to see everything fully restored though, since the only way to get them back was to roll player city data back by a day and a half.
“Due to an issue in world saves, we haven’t been able to restore player cities as they should have been restored – that is, as they were ~30 minutes before the hack took place,” the developers explained. “Instead, we had to roll them back to the previous patch, i.e. as they were in the late evening (EU time) of November 17. This means player cities effectively suffered a rollback of 1.5 days, while the rest of player and world progress was untouched.”
“We are aware this is an atypical response to the issue (the typical one would have been a full rollback), but we felt it was the right decision to minimize damage,” they added. “Our GM team will help groups who have lost their city (or lost buildings within it) to reclaim it and rebuild it, including rebuilding player land parcels within the city.”
Dynamight Studio Jacopo Galleli also offered a detailed explanation of what the hacker did and how he was able to do it. The hacker apparently exploited a server vulnerability to acquire an authentication token and login using an admin character. He/she then used the character’s admin powers to teleport across the game world and used the “unclaim city” admin command to essentially delete all player cities.
Galleli also reiterated that no login credentials or player data were compromised during the attack and that the database hadn’t been compromised. He further explains that they use an algorithm to store passwords and that it would take centuries for a hacker to brute-force an 8-character password.
The team has also implemented additional security measures to prevent similar attacks in the future and are working with IT security specialists to identify and fix other potential backend issues.
