What makes EVE Online so exciting is that it gives players so much freedom to do cruel and thrilling things. This can also make players very angry. Developer CCP took down the servers for EVE and its PlayStation 3 FPS spin-off Dust 514 over the weekend following a nasty denial-of-service attack, and while we don't know who did it or why, let's just pretend it was someone enraged by the serious world of Internet spaceships; it's more fun that way.
CCP noticed a "significant and sustained" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the Tranquility server, which houses EVE and Dust as well as its websites, on Saturday evening. It took Tranquility down to "put in place mitigation plans" and brought it back 11 hours later, but changed its mind and took it all down again after "additional information" came to light.
"With the highest sense of precaution we took the decision to take Tranquility and associated websites back down for further investigation and an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure," CCP Games COO Jón Hörðdal Jónasson explained in a blog post.
"What we can now confirm is that a person was able to utilize a vulnerability in one of the back-end services that support the operation of the Tranquility server. This vulnerability has now been secured and thoroughly tested."
Don't worry: CCP is quite confident that the naughty attacker(s) got nowhere near personal data.
EVE and Dust are now back up and running, and CCP says it's "looking at ways to compensate players" for the outrage. What exactly players are to receive will be announced later.