Second life virtual world attacked by virus or worm

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 20 November 2006 21:01

Your IT - Entertainment

Grey goo infects the virtual world with golden rings that seem to have been inspired by the rings in the classic game ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’. With the virus causing a heavy load on the servers, Second Life needed to be shut down and cleansed before going online once more. Will this happen again?

A virus has infected a virtual world, and there’s no Matrix like Neo saviour in sight, flying around the world zapping the bug with his super matrix-y powers. Instead, Second Life’s technicians needed to take the world offline over the weekend and clean it of all sings of the virus before turning it all back on again.

When Second Life’s users, represented by graphical avatars, tried interacting with the spinning rings, they replicated, causing the massive slowdown.  The fix took two hours to implement, no doubt frustrating a lot of users.

Some found it quite funny and interesting, while others were quite angry that their virtual world could be attacked in this manner.

On the official blog, Second Life user Loretta Lurra asked "Can this game get any more unpredictable and exciting?".

The World of Warcraft virtual world was attacked recently, causing problems with user’s avatars, but this is the third time since only September that Second Life has been infested by virtual objects, when a ‘copybot’ was able to digitally copy items in the Second Life world, depriving store holders, who rent virtual land and pay real money to Second Life for the privilege, were unable to sell goods as they were being copied for free.

The owners of Second Life, a company known as Linden Lab, refers such incidents to the FBI for investigation. With car companies and news outlets opening offices in Second Life, along with tech companies hold press conferences there, perhaps it’s time for the FBI or Interpol to also open an office to keep a virtual eye on things.

Second Life is populated by more than 1.5 million people with Linden Labs advising that the population is growing at around 38% per month.

Will it happen again? The answer has to be yes, sadly. But Linden Labs will no doubt be keeping a closer watch on their virtual world to ensure that digital peace and cyber order is maintain to the best of their ability.