Description

The "Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore" MMORPG fell victim to a ransomware attack that resulted in the loss of 17,000 player accounts along with their in-game progress and items. Created by indie game publisher 'Gellyberry Studios,' Ethyrial is an 'Early Access' release accessible on Steam, relying on subscriptions and community support for ongoing development. The attackers targeted the main server, encrypting all data, including local backup drives, and demanded a ransom in Bitcoin for a decryption key. Fearing that complying with the demand might not ensure recovery, the developers decided against paying the ransom. Instead, they manually restored affected systems and databases after the encryption. The official announcement stated, "Our server fell victim to a cryptographic ransomware attack, encrypting all data and demanding Bitcoin payment in a ransom note." All 17,000 player accounts and in-game characters were impacted. Gellyberry Studios committed to diligently restoring lost progress and items for affected players, offering gestures of appreciation such as item recovery and a premium "pet." The company also assured players of enhanced security measures, including more frequent offline account database backups, the implementation of a P2P VPN for remote server access, and restricted access based on specific IP addresses. Server functionality was restored later that Friday, with Gellyberry urging affected players to create new accounts and request manual restoration by contacting the development team via email. While ransomware attacks on game publishers have been witnessed before, they typically affect the company rather than the players themselves. Previous incidents include ransomware attacks on CD PROJEKT RED, the developers of 'Cyberpunk 2077' and 'Witcher 3,' as well as a hacker group demanding a $10,000,000 ransom from Riot Games for the stolen source code of 'League of Legends' and 'Valorant' in January 2023.