‘Second Life’ Attacked With ‘Christmas Present’ on Xmas Day

The online community Second Life's flourishing virtual economy produced its first real-life millionaire recently. The community announced estate agent Ailin Graef to have reached the member mark of one million.

However, the virtual world is not okay with all things. Malicious users have been invading systems with a series of "grey goo" attacks over the last few months. But Linden Lab experts have tried to fix the problem and restore the world. One of the attacks in November caused services go kaput temporarily.

The most recent attack occurred on December 25 at 9 pm PST. The worm has been named "Christmas Present". It also mutated as objects looking green genitalia wearing Santa hats. They were also making a noise like that of laughter.

The MMODump.com blog announced yet another series of 'goo' attacks starting to strike the community players. They too resemble exactly like the previous ones only containing a different name and message. The object is called 'Christmas Present' that spam an obnoxious message while distributing its replicas at random.

According to the blog, the objects are featured with physics that greatly slows down Sims and make a sound that could be similar to sobbing. There were hundreds of them whose owner was an avatar named 'llMakeExplosion Toll'.

At 9:10 pm Linden Labs stated that it had come to know about the problem. Following this Jeska Linden updated the Official Linden Blog at 11:15 pm and announced that it set the problem right. Jeska wrote on the blog that she was pleased to inform that the earlier issues were almost resolved and those areas that were damaged through the replication attack were being restored. Second Life was back to its scheduled Christmas.

Recent attacks on Second Life have raised a flurry of criticisms by its players. They stated different complaints in the forums. Some believed there were now a lot many users in the game; some said they would sell their land; and many demanded that access be restricted to only with a paid subscription to prevent tourists and an "unsustainable" growth in new sign-ups.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 1/3/2007