Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore is currently on track to emerge from 2023 as one of the most battered and bruised MMORPGs on the market. It’s certainly seen its share of bad luck and self-inflicted wounds, but this past week brought an even worse blow: a ransomware attack that resulted in the outright deletion of all of the game’s 17,000 accounts.
“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 studio reported. “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.”
The studio vowed to “personally, manually restore” all accounts of those who put in a ticket. Additionally, a corrupted wolf pet is being handed out as compensation and the studio is working to beef up its security and backup processes.
