Indie game dev hit by ransomware attack that wiped all player accounts
Ransomware operators have disabled the 17,000 user accounts registered to Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore, an independently developed Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG).
The title is developed by Gellyberry Studios, which previously published a short announcement on its official Discord channel in the wake of the event revealing that, despite the catastrophe, it plans to continue work on the game and is trying to repair what it can. the affected player base with a new account system.
“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,” the developers explained.
“In these types of cases, 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.”
Manual restoration
Exactly which ransomware group attacked Gellyberry, or how much money they demanded, is unclear, but it makes sense that the studio rejected the offer. The game is still in its ‘Early Access’ stage on Steam, meaning the game is in early development and relies on monthly subscriptions to survive.
While the accounts and their progress were lost, Gellyberry said it would restore everything manually “to the fullest extent possible for everyone involved.” Additionally, users will receive a free “pet” as a thank you to anyone who sticks around after recovery.
To protect against future attacks, the developers promised more frequent backups of the account databases, P2P VPN for all remote access to the development server, and a limit on the IP range that can access it.
While ransomware attacks on game developers are nothing new, hackers usually target established names like CD PROJEKT RED or Riot. Still, the odds are right.