Second Life Hit By Massive In-Game Worm

An anonymous reader writes, "At 2:46 CST today, the game Second Life was hit by a massive attack by a rogue programmer. Spinning gold rings began to appear in the air and on the ground, and as users interacted with them they began to chase and replicate. Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before and this invoked a worm script that was designed to multiply and spread across the 2,700+ servers run by Linden Labs in California, the game's owner. Many of the six hundred thousand active users experienced serious lag and lost connectivity to the servers, making it one of the largest known denial-of-service attacks in an online game. Linden Labs had to invoke martial law and lock out all logins by users except their staff as they began the task of cleaning the servers of what they began to term 'the grey goo.'" Comments in the SL blog entry indicate that Linden Labs had already deployed a "grey goo fence" before this worm struck, but someone found a hole in it.

Neat!

Now what they need is some sort of illness that affects characters temporarily, just like real life! Imagine, your character gets a cold and slows down and sneezes every once in a while. Or hey, you go kiss another character (if that's possible) and your character gets infected with herpes! Wouldn't that be fun? Oh wait - that was me last weekend. Damn.

Re:Someone please explain

Calling it a 'worm' is kind of a stretch. It does not affect your local computer, it affects the view of the world in your local client. It doesn't run code on your computer, it just adds extra "in-game" items that automatically duplicate themselves and clog the Tubes.

Re:Someone please explain

Huh? By definition a worm is a self replicating program or algorithm that causes harm, even if only by using bandwidth, network, or computer resources.

That is exactly what this worm did.

Re:Someone please explain

How does this work in these games that someone is ever allowed to inject a code that can run on someone elses session?

Second Life users are able to create objects using a fairly complete scripting language. The scripts run on the servers, and an object can create more objects when somebody interacts with it. It "runs" in other peoples' sessions not because it's running on their system but because they're all viewing the same MMORPG environment.

And to preempt your inevitable comment, yes, it is very lame. I can't believe people are paying ongoing fees (in US dollars) to hold land in this thing.

Re:Someone please explain

every object you create in SL can have scripts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linden_Scripting_Lang uage [wikipedia.org] added to them, that fire on different events, ie touch, never ending loops or the right click menu etc.
some of the commands let you create/spawn (i cant think of the word they use) other objects, like rain, or stars that follow you as you fly around. These objects in turn can have there own scripts too.
i don't know my self how they normally stop never ending loops of created objects other than them asking people nicely not to do it.
Some people have asked to able to disable the scripts but this, i think would have a to greater effects as every thing, doors, cars, lifts, dance club lights etc use the scripts.

i don't mind it, as long a people remember that its really just a glorified chat program with scripts, ie irc with a gui /fish

Re:Someone please explain

i don't mind it, as long a people remember that its really just a glorified chat program with scripts, ie irc with a gui /fish

In that same vein, I would mind this WWW thing a lot less, if people remember that it's really just a glorified Gopher program with scripts...

Ha

Proof that all it takes to kill the Internet is something shiny.

Re:Ha

Linden labs have released Images of the suspected mastermind [arstechnica.com]. If sighted, do not approach the suspect, and inform police!

Not just misleading, but factually inaccurate too!

First off, there were only about 14,000 people on the system at the time, not 600,000 as indicated in the summary. Second, while they did lock out new logins, it should be pointed out that any user who was currently online was not kicked off - and the period of "martial law" lasted about 20 minutes.

Of course, if there were 600,000 users on at the same time, the "game" would be unplayable - it's tough enough when it gets over about 10,000 right now.

Re:Not just misleading, but factually inaccurate t

Of course, if there were 600,000 users on at the same time, the "game" would be unplayable - it's tough enough when it gets over about 10,000 right now.

With 2700+ servers they have a hard time handling more than 10k users? Less than 4 users per server is tough enough? Um, I think there's Opportunities here.

--
*Art

Re:Not just misleading, but factually inaccurate t

With 2700+ servers they have a hard time handling more than 10k users? Less than 4 users per server is tough enough?

The problem is that the world is Zone Based, meaning each server is responsible for a equal size geographic portion of the world. The result is that processing power is spread evenly over the whole world. The problem is that people like to congregate causing some geographic areas to have more players, and other servers to have none. Where you have more players, you have more work for the server causing everything on that server to slow down. So the result is that the places players most want to be are also the places with the greatest lag. The unfortunate result is that many players have a negative experience right away.

Really, the whole server architecture needs to be reworked to behave more like a proper cluster, but that is too large of a change to ever consider implementing without starting over from scratch.

Bad soap opera...

Second Life as the worm turns.

And it was just getting good

A few weeks ago I was hearing things about SL like that corporations were holding press conferences there, businesses were running there and making good profits, and its economy was worth millions of dollars. I thought SL was just beginning to become important, and show the world that a virtual economy was a viable idea.

Now we have CopyBot and grey goo and it seems like SL is just another dodgy online game after all.

Re:And it was just getting good

It's also a haven for sleaze [somethingawful.com]. Say what you want about people's right to free expression, but there is such a thing as going too far [somethingawful.com]. It's no wonder that Second Life has attracted so much ire. It was a "dodgy online game" long before Copybot and grey goo hit the scene.

Re:And it was just getting good

Now we have CopyBot and grey goo and it seems like SL is just another dodgy online game after all

Wow, given the same evidence, I drew exactly the opposite conclusion. A simple "dodgy online game" wouldn't give its players enough control over their world to allow this sort of shennanigans to happen. Things like viruses can only occur when people are given access to a Turing-complete programming language and allowed to do what they like with it... which is what SL does, and why it's not "just a game", but rather a platform. Granted, it may be an infant platform, still buggy and insecure, and not necessarily useful for very much yet, but then you could say the same thing about the Internet itself a few years ago.

Re:And it was just getting good

Excuse me, but how could an "online economy" ever be viable? It doesn't produce anything, and [clip]

You're new, I'm guessing...

It produces an environment whereby the ever sought-after eyeballs are gathered, occasionally focused and always tracked. Doesn't matter if it is a polar bear in a snow storm, if you can prove that the multitudes are looking your way, you can cash in.

Re:And it was just getting good

Next week: "How viruses and trojans prove that e-mail will never be used as a business tool".

What?

What? No Screenshot from anybody?

Who dun it?

So who did it? Most people will probably blame the W-Hats, methinks.

Re:Who dun it?

Sonic and Tails!

- Shadow

Second Life slowed down?

Wow, so now they're blaming it on a "worm"... ok. SL is like watching an MMO flipbook, the packet-loss is phenomenal while they continue to supposedly attract corporations and live-weather map projects, host in-game advertising and I'm sure making money off people somehow with Linden cash transfers. Buy some freaking servers, or get rid of the 2,700 solar-powered calculators currently running the thing.

Getting close to "Snow Crash" here

This reads like something from Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash".

I never thought we'd get real systems vulnerable to attacks with 3D visual components as an integral part of the attack. This is much closer to SF than expected.

Is there a video?

Second Life = Snow Crash

Take one look at some of the screenshots from that game and *boom* say byebye to your cerebral cortex. Think of the ugliest possible art stretched into three dimensions doing things that would make Japanese tentacle monsters say "Hey, that just ain't right".

Time for some Black Ice

Wow, talk about reality imitating art. Or, art imitating art. Or technology imitating art. Or the virtual imitating the virtual.

Annnyway, this sure brings me back a few years. The first time I read Neuromancer [wikipedia.org], I thought, "Damn, what would it be like to live in a world where interacting with computers is so visceral?" We haven't developed networked, immersive 3d environments, but we've sure come a long way from the days when just getting on the Internet from home was a major accomplishment.

I'd say this attack is proof that no matter how creative and interesting and fun an environment you create, there's always going to be someone out there who will put a lot of time and effort into pissing in it. I'm sure the creator of the worm has some sort of wonderful rationalization, of course. I wonder, is it worse to attack networks in the name of profit (or patriotism), or to do so just because you can?

Like a snake around the brainstem

Hey Kid, Want to try some Snow Crash?

Screenshots?

This thread is worthless without pictures.

Does anyone have screenshots of the alleged "grey goo"?

Re:Screenshots?

I found a screenshot over at Snapzilla [sluniverse.com].

Nice Hack

Nice hack. Kudos to whomever pulled it off. The videogame generation is in danger of becoming a legion of conformist, rule-following lab mice, conditioned to obey and consume, differentiated only by which Big Media corporation they swear allegiance to. It's good to see someone somewhere is sowing discord. Eris would be pleased, but then who gives a fuck what she thinks ;P

For those that aren't familiar.

Second life allows users to create virtual objects which can be sold (or transfered) to others. These are much like physical objects in the game world, like body parts (to change the way you look) and can be sold from ingame vending machines or whatever. Most, if not all, have scripts associated with them to direct their behaviour and how they interact with other objects or users. I don't know if this is compiled to bytecode or what. Something like this probably resulted from a duplicate_when_touched() or something similar that worked around the grey goo protection.

Second Life needs a new name

Linden Labs had to invoke martial law...

Some people seriously need to get a grip. This is all ones and zeroes - comparisons with "martial law" are just silly. Second Life needs to be renamed to give its users a much needed message - namely, Get A Life

Re:Second Life needs a new name

Second Life needs to be renamed to give its users a much needed message - namely, Get A Life

I submit that anybody who posts to Slashdot about the other people's need to "get a life" should spontaneously explode from sheer force of concentrated hypocrisy.

Mum nailed it!

Like my Mom always used to say: "Don't take virtual candy from virtual strangers".

This one wasn't much to write home about afaict

I was online when this thing was attacking, and it never seemed to get to my sim - I saw the notices, and the web notice that they'd locked things down to linden login, but they let anyone there stay. It was laggy, but that's not that unusual these days. At least with this one, the grid was never fully down (if you were already in or didn't get booted) and the Lindens were able to contain and clean it up pretty quick (unlike some of the marathon outages caused by goo of the past). Total offline time for this one was about 1/2 hour.

A clarification - even if there are currently ~600k active user accounts there are usually only ~10K or so online any given time of day.

Anyway, I'd say the overreaction to copy bot did more damage to SL as a whole than this thing did.

Yawn.

Well, look on the bright side...

It looks like the admins now have a "second job"....

Stuff

I'm suprised this hasn't happened before. (Well, it did. But nobody cared. And rightly so.)

In a virtual world where you can script any object and have it any other player interact with it, there's bound to be an errant object which bounces 100ft into the air and splits into thousands of self-replicating drones. It's only natural.

Heck, I'd do that in my 'first life', but I'm not that good at origami.

This sounds like a job for...

Sonic the Hedgehog!

Sorcerer's Apprentice

This appears to be related, at least in concept, to problem which sometimes comes up in network protocol design, Sorcerer's Apprentice Syndrome [wikipedia.org], which results in a cascade of copies that eventually overwhelms the ability of the connection to transmit and route the duplicates. The term originates from the Walt Disney animated feature Fantasia where the Sorcerer's Apprentice (Mickey Mouse in the red robes and wizard hat) accidentally causes the mops washing the floor to increase via geometric doubling. One wonders if other MMORPGs are vulnerable to similar attacks.

One ring...

...to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

the real solution is to...

...find the key of the twilight. those worms can be data-drained right?

Say it ain't so!

"At 2:46 CST today, the game Second Life was hit by a massive attack by a rogue programmer.

Uh oh, I think SkyNet just became self-aware... of its Second Life account.

Reality Check! (nya!)

Is this anything like the Puffy Cat Virus?

WoW

Now we just need something like this to happen to WoW.

Playing Doctor.

"Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before"

You should be so lucky.

Matrix Revolutions?

When I read this I immediately thought Matrix Revolutions where Agent Smith sticks his hand into people to infect them with the computer virus; you gotta admit - it's similar; triggering actions through "physical" actions in a virtual environment ... interesting.

I tried Second Life for the first time last week; gave up after 5 minutes - average ping of 9000 ms.

Well it is second life

What do you expect it is a faithful recreation of the world we live in. Next you'll by catching typhoid and watch people taking rice stools. In fact thinking about it, so you think the developers have a god mode where they can introduce plagues, frogs and such?

Here's a link

To what appears to be a screenshot of the worm. Description seems to match... If the site goes down I'll put it up on an image sharing site.

Ah but the big question is...

If you get 100 rings do you turn into Super-Sonic? ^_^

dumbest slashdot story ever

Did anyone read this before posting it? the figure of 600,000 was pulled out sof someones butt. I have never seen more than 25,000 people on SL. It's certainly not the largest denial of service in the game, in fact script attacks like this happen almost weekly in SL and always involve cutting off new log ins. I've never heard them use the term martial law and the supposedly new term grey goo has been used for months and months in realtion to these self replicating object attacks. The in-game scripting makes this sort of attack childs play. This attack is barely news even within SL. Even a cursory glance at the page linked will tell you all of this, but apparently not even the posters read their own links now. I think I'll start submitting random weather reports to slashdot, I'm sure some of them will slip through slashdots crack staff and be posted.

on a related note, why can't we moderate stories as "-1 posted by an idiot"?

Cool or evil?

Like most others who have posted so far, my first reaction to this disaster was "Cool!" But when I think about it, I get uncertain to what the rational reaction is. There are several forgiving factors to this prank/terrorist act:

• It is just a virtual world, just a game.
• The vulnerability of the system was demonstrated, possibly a good thing. It makes you consider the consequences about DOS-attacks in the real world.
• It lets people think about what is important in First Life: Maybe it is not a computer game?
• Some things has to be tried, sort of like climbing Mount Everest.
• I was not affected. :-)

Nevertheless, this may ruin someones evening of good-hearted fun, affect SL's legitimate business and possibly (somewhat tangential) even ruin it. That is not fair and right.

Is this event really so easily forgiven? Why are we not condemning this action with as much venom as we do with spam?

Well, big deal

The first time I saw something like that happen it was really bad. Performance was very badly affected, and the objects would launch people into the air, so the only thing that could be done was sitting (you can't be pushed if you're sitting) and talking until they fixed it. And after a while the whole grid had to be brought down for hours.

Now all that happens is that things slow down for a while, they close logins for a few minutes, and soon everything is back to normality. Some areas aren't even very noticeably affected, because object creation is disabled, so the stuff doesn't get to run on those sims in the first place. The only effect felt there is the degradation of the central servers.

While it's certainly annoying, it's not nearly the problem it used to be.

Cheesy

I imagine SL Admins looking at their screens showing scrolling pages of code or random characters, green on black of course, wildly hacking on their keyboards, shouting "IT BREACHED THE THIRD FIREWALL! IT'S GOING FOR THE CORE!"

Quick fix!

[PST 3:18] The grid has been reopened to all log-ins. Welcome back!

[PST 3:07 PM] Log-ins will be closed to all except Linden staff while we finish cleaning up the aftermath of the grey goo attack.

[PST 2:44PM] An attack of self-replicators is causing heavy load on the database, which is in turn slowing down in-world activity. We have isolated the grey goo and are currently cleaning up the grid. We'll keep you updated as status changes.

Under an hour from recognizing the problem to fixed. If this were WoW, the servers would have been down 3 or 4 days!

No publicity is bad...

I've been seeing an awful lot of stories about second life lately. First it was businesses opening virtual stores, then the copybot and now this. Is it all coincidence, or has Linden Labs been pushing their marketing campaign into high gear?

This isn't news.

It's business as usual in Second Life. NEWS would be if there WASN'T an exploit for a whole week.

An abridged history of SL DoS attacks

This latest attack isn't the newest or most severe Second Life has experienced. In October 2006, a glut of attacks [secretlair.com] followed a vague "terrorist" threat [secretlair.com] uttered by self-replicating objects. In April 2006, three major attacks [secretlair.com] took place. Almost a year ago today, Linden Lab blocked a DoS attack by deploying a giant virtual firewall in-world [secretlair.com], but I don't think that method is still used. Linden Lab had suggested earlier this year it would bring DoS attackers to the attention of law-enforcement agencies, but the results (if any) have not been publicized.

Does it fuck up your brain?

... Or your computer?

Pretty hard up for stories?

The whole thing was managed in about an hour, which is pretty good. Hard to believe this was Slashdot fodder. Quick, someone post a 'Ballmer is an idiot' story!

Sounds like a 12-year-old girl.

Self inflicted wounds to get attention.

Threshold

Spinning gold rings began to appear in the air and on the ground, and as users interacted with them they began to chase and replicate.

Any chance this was accompanied by a sound, something akin to sharpening knives?

Need to make duplication expensive

This is a great funny story.

I guess the real lesson is that Linden Labs needs to figure out how to make instance instansation in SL expensive so it would be worthless to try these types of attacks.
Like forcing a confirmation whenever you wanted to create a new object. (or giving each new creation a price, like 1 Linden dollar or something)

Then second life could be exactly like real life...

Cheers
Ben

Hack Sign

Reminds me of Hack Sign anime series, where a gold ring started killing random characters of "The World", a virtual immersive MMORPG.

Ring collection

The very first post in the fine article mentions that the author,"heard a bunch of rings being collected". What is the significance of the rings being collected, whose rings are they, and why is the author listening to them?

Ya know in D&D...

...there's hooks and bubbles and whatnot that appear as the far end result of divination and summoning spells to other planes like the elemental planes...

That's what came to mind...

It is almost as though artificial life is mimicking art now. VR people falling for casts into their plane of existance...

"I'm afraid we can't get your son out Mrs. Thompson. He was pulled from his instance to someplace else and if we cut him off now, it would be neural overload. We're trying to find where he was abducted to and we will then dive in and rescue him, get him to an exit portal or try to do what they did and present him with a hook out of there."

Hmmm...

Why is this newsworthy????

It's the same shit that has been happening about every week on average since the game was in beta 3 years ago. The one reported on wasn't even that big a deal. How about the rash of them a few months back that took the game out for the better part of a DAY repeatedly for a week?