Albion Online’s DDOS blackmail saga continues

    
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I’ve more than once joked with our writers and readers that Massively OP is not an uptime monitor, but we’re making a special exception for the beleaguered Albion Online this week. As we’ve previously reported, the newbie sandbox has been suffering a series of nasty DDOS attacks since early last weekend, causing repeated server outages and extreme frustrations that have continued into today.

Sandbox Interactive has characterized the outages as the “result of a concerted effort to bring Albion Online down with a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS),” which the developers believe is retaliation for their actions against goldsellers plaguing the game. Furthermore, as we noted yesterday, Sandbox says that it’s been served with a ransom demand from the attackers, which the studio characterized as a “blackmail” attempt for money that it will not give into.

“It goes without saying that we will never give in to them. As every black mailer will know, it’s the worst thing you could ever do. Of course, every blackmail attempt and DDOS attack is being reported to the relevant law enforcement agencies, too, though realistically the chance to catch somebody is quite slim. Having said that, sometimes it does happen, and if it does, we will pursue every case to the fullest extend possible, no matter where the offender is based – above activities are a crime in every jurisdiction in the world and it’s always possible to find a local law firm to represent you.”

The anti-gold-seller measures, by the way, involve targeting goldsellers’ funding sources and reporting fraudsters to credit card companies. “We are not trying to go after the gold sellers directly, as that usually won’t work, but rather shut down their means of getting paid and we are eager to find out how successful this will be,” said the studio.

Last night, Sandbox apologized to players for all the downtime. “There are no quick solutions here,” Game Director Robin Henkys told players. “We’re in touch with various experts on the topic who are helping us improve our defense infrastructure, but these attacks can and will most likely continue to occur until we’ve made some significant changes. We thank you for your understanding and please understand that we will only be making any statements on how we’ll handle the time lost in these attacks once they are over and we have a final understanding of how much damage they did. Until then, please hang in there with us, we’re not giving up the fight, and neither should you! We have great plans for Albion and we intend to see them through.”

Source: Official forums. Cheers, Thanos!
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