Tasos
04-13-2007, 06:38 PM
“At the end of March the software manufacturer, Aventurine, caught a Dutch intruder in the act. The intruder had made an illegal copy of a part of a trial version of Darkfall Online, a highly anticipated online computer game under development. The intruder also placed an affiliate banner to a well known "gold farming" website on a hosted site on Aventurine's webserver. Aventurine immediately reported the illegal actions and the Dutch Public Prosecutor's Office took firm action and traced after which he was remanded. The equipment was confiscated. It was not established that any further copies of the game had been made or distributed via the Internet. The effect of the intrusion is minimal to the release date of Darkfall."
That’s a rough translation of the statement we had to make for the media in the Netherlands through our representative there. A news story ran there about a “hacker” breaking into the systems of a game developer and stealing a copy of the game. The story didn’t name us, however it was about us. The article mentioned other gaming companies as “victims” of the “hacker”.
What happened basically is that we caught an intruder on our web server sometime in March. We forwarded our evidence to the Dutch Public Prosecutor’s office and they promptly made an arrest and confiscated the intruder’s equipment about three weeks ago.
What’s important to know is that the Darkfall source code is safe. We keep our valuable assets offline. What the intruder managed to do is to download an older test client. The client, for those who don't know, is the software that every user installs on his computer to connect to the game server and play the game. Dutch authorities have informed us that there doesn’t seem to be any distribution of the test client. To be on the safe side, we have been taking all measures necessary to protect the game - as if the test client had been distributed.
There’s a lot more we’d like to say on this topic, but there’s an ongoing criminal investigation and the person in question is in custody.
In the original article there’s mention of the intruder being an enthusiastic fan of online games. Any little sympathy we might have had for him went out the window when we discovered a “gold farmer” connection. He placed an affiliate advertising banner for a well know gold farming company on a hosted site on our web server. If his motivation was gold farming profits, then that’s one less pimple on the ass of online gaming.
That’s a rough translation of the statement we had to make for the media in the Netherlands through our representative there. A news story ran there about a “hacker” breaking into the systems of a game developer and stealing a copy of the game. The story didn’t name us, however it was about us. The article mentioned other gaming companies as “victims” of the “hacker”.
What happened basically is that we caught an intruder on our web server sometime in March. We forwarded our evidence to the Dutch Public Prosecutor’s office and they promptly made an arrest and confiscated the intruder’s equipment about three weeks ago.
What’s important to know is that the Darkfall source code is safe. We keep our valuable assets offline. What the intruder managed to do is to download an older test client. The client, for those who don't know, is the software that every user installs on his computer to connect to the game server and play the game. Dutch authorities have informed us that there doesn’t seem to be any distribution of the test client. To be on the safe side, we have been taking all measures necessary to protect the game - as if the test client had been distributed.
There’s a lot more we’d like to say on this topic, but there’s an ongoing criminal investigation and the person in question is in custody.
In the original article there’s mention of the intruder being an enthusiastic fan of online games. Any little sympathy we might have had for him went out the window when we discovered a “gold farmer” connection. He placed an affiliate advertising banner for a well know gold farming company on a hosted site on our web server. If his motivation was gold farming profits, then that’s one less pimple on the ass of online gaming.