Veterans of our genre know that MMORPG launches are never smooth, but some launches can go far worse than others. That sadly appears to be the case for the early access return of ROSE Online, a Korean MMO that came back under new stewardship last week but has very recently disclosed that a security leak sprang forth.
Announcements arrived to both the game’s Discord and its official forums early in the week, starting with an alert of the leak and subsequent server shutdown this past Tuesday, which was then further elaborated on yesterday; that post explained that the team was informed of the leak last week but the cause was misidentified and the devs were unaware information was still leaking until another alert arrived on Tuesday.
“The data leak originates from our login service which due to a bug was not correctly clearing data, which in turn would result in some data leaking under certain circumstances,” the post elaborates. “As many of you are aware, we inherited a large and old code base when we started this project. It appears that this data leak has existed in this code for a very long time, predating our acquisition of it, but has seemingly gone unnoticed.”
The devs are warning anyone who logged in between December 13th and 20th that their email address and partial passwords may now be out in the open and that any passwords which are shared between ROSE and other services should be changed immediately.
Meanwhile, the game put up patch notes for an update yesterday but at the time of this writing the game is still offline as the team is forced to rewrite some code thanks to the security leak.
“Basically what’s happening is we have applied a lot of security patches to harden the server security but issues happened as soon as lot of players joined the game. […] Our fault to have worked too fast without extensively tested our new codes as we really wanted to put the server online as soon as possible. We are not gonna be able to put the server online for the next hours as the whole team is exhausted and need to sleep.”
