Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore had a rocky launch earlier this year, and while many players were likely up in arms over some of the issues it had out of the gate, news of a ransomware attack that saw over 17 thousand accounts deleted might be the last straw.
On the official Discord server for the indie MMO, Ethyrial's developers announced that a ransomware attack hit its servers, with the hacker demanding a Bitcoin payment to provide access back to the ransomed servers. The update on Discord mentions that, in many cases like this, the payment will be taken but the ransomed data is usually never actually released.
"Last Friday morning our server fell victim to a cryptographic ransomware attack, which systematically encrypted all data on the system/local backup drive and left a ransom note to pay in Bitcoin to decrypt the files. In cases like this, hackers will often take a payment and never provide the decryption key. As such, we were forced to rebuild the server and create new account and character databases. Game-related files were not lost - such as zones, items, monsters, etc. No customer data was accessed or removed."
While no customer data was accessed - which is a good thing - the resulting action has seen all 17,000 user accounts and characters lost with the hack. However, the team is vowing to restore every account for players who have lost everything. This includes items, titles, pets, and more.
This will, unfortunately, require some work on the player's part - they'll need to email the team or DM the developers on Discord to start a support ticket process. Ethyrial's team is promising accounts to be brought back whole, with a new corrupted wolf pet as an apology.
Moving forward, the Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore team states they will be beefing up their security on the server, as well as making more frequent backups, and especially decentralizing them, to help combat future ransomware attacks having such a widespread impact.
As of this morning, the servers are back up, and players will be prompted to make a new account when starting the MMO.
Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore hasn't had an easy go of it since it launched earlier this year. Initially launching on May 1st, the team dealt with exploits, reports of double billing customers, disappearing items and much more. The MMO went free-to-play just two months after launching, stating that a more polished relaunch was coming later. It's been a bumpy ride, with the latest issue only causing more setbacks, it seems. It'll be interesting to see how the indie team comes out of the other end of this attack and whether or not the majority of those 17,000 accounts affected will come back.
