Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore Hit With Ransomware
The online MMORPG Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore came under a heavy ransomware attack two days ago. The cyber hack deleted more than 17,000 user accounts on the gaming platform. Investigations are still ongoing into the brutal use of malware.
Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore had a rocky launch earlier this year, and while many players may have been up in arms over some of the issues out of the gate, the ransomware attack that deleted over 17 thousand accounts might have been the final straw.
The developers of the indie MMO, Ethyrial, announced on their Discord server that a ransomware attack hit their servers. Later, the hackers demanded Bitcoin payments to restore access.
According to the update on Discord, in many cases like this, the payment will be taken, but the ransomed data will never be 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.”
It is important to note that no customer data was accessed, but all 17,000 user accounts and characters were affected by the hack. The team is committed to restoring all accounts for those who have lost everything, including items, titles, pets, and more.
To begin the support ticket process, players must email the team or DM the developers on Discord. Ethyrial’s team promises accounts will be restored with a corrupted wolf pet as an apology.
Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore states that it will be improving security on the server, implementing more frequent backups, and especially decentralizing them to help prevent future ransomware attacks.