Drinking CCP's Carebear Tears

So I got a bunch of negative feedback yesterday from people who thought my post criticizing CCP for security issues culminating with the devastating DDOS from lulzSec. As I said in a later edit it does seem that the attack was purely DDOS and not a genuine hack, however it is still a BIG problem for CCP. I am going to try and describe why in terms EVE players may understand.

CCP is a hi-sec missioning alliance that has ground it's way up from doing L1s in Rifters to dominating L4s throughout hi-sec space. LulzSec is a griefer corp with a -10.0 sec status. Anytime LulzSec pops out of 0.0 or low-sec and into hi-sec, CONCORD (the police, FBI, etc) go after them. Unfortunatly LulzSec uses fast agile ships and CONCORD can't quite seem to get a lock on them before they go elsewhere. Yesterday they were trying to boost up the epeen by going after some juicy hi-sec targets. One of these targets was the CCP Alliance. CCP's officer fit Nightmare was attacked and barely made it to warp deep in structure before being taken down. CCP then proceeded to hide in station for several hours refusing to play. Many in the CCP alliance (including the players) ranted in local across New Eden about how LulzSec 'should go get a life', 'get a girlfriend' and move out of your 'parents basement'. There was even a ten page long thread in COAD about it.

Now what do you think is going to happen?
1. LulzSec realizes that the harm it is doing is real. This is internet spaceships after-all. Important stuff! LulzSec slowly morphs into an Anti-pirate consulting group to teach others how to avoid being taken down.

or

2. LulzSec get really drunk. Those carebear tears... so tasty. My god they stuck it out in station for hours after they had moved on. Lets try it again.


Any questions?

Edit: And down it goes again

CCP Being Hacked

This is my first EVE is dying thread, but this time it may be correct. As I am writing this EVE is offline thanks to an attack by lulzsec. This is very serious for CCP and actually might be a killing blow.

As I see it CCP has had a lot of problems lately. Despite having a huge monthly injection of cash from its 300k+ subscribers, it, as an organization has become completely dysfunctional. Lets go over the major problems that I am aware of:

1. Unable to get Dust514 onto the XBox platform.

2. Playstation (which will be used by Dust) network being hacked resulting in Credit Card information leaks.

3. Buggy releases of new unpopular features
    -Quafe-zero / PLEX scam
    -Crashing Tyranis Patches
    -Null-sec nerfage

4. Failure to deal with Macros resulting in it's signature gaming experience (0.0) being controlled by RMT traders

5. Failure to deliver new functionality

6. A huge security failure in thier new forum leading to it being taken down after a few hours.

7. Huge negative feedback over handling of the 9th Alliance Tournament Qualification Round

And now.... CCP being driven off the internet by a DDOS attack and probably hacked at the same time. At present CCP is claiming that it was just a DDOS but past experience with these hackers indicates that they do more than just DDOS. The Conservative Part of Canada was hacked, the party claimed nothing was leaked, and then Lulz proved otherwise. The fact that CCP has pretty much taken themselves off the internet leads me to think the problem here is a lot more than TQ going down.

Notice a trend here? I have highlighted in RED those issues that relate to security.


TL;DR.... cancel your credit cards you use to play EVE with. Don't trust them with real money ever again.


Edit:
Interesting feedback for this post...

Anonymous said...
The reason for Dust being PS3 exclusive is because CCP would not like for players to pay for XBox Live as an additional cost and because it would be a market different from EVE players. Sony has since patched up their network from the terribly insecure state is was in before.

CCP had demoed Dust before on the X-Box. However they clearly could not satisfy whatever requirements Microsoft had to be on X-Box so they are now PS3 exclusive. This effectively cuts their audience (and revenue) in half.

The crashing Tyrannis patches are not so much a security issue as it is a QA mishap.

 Think that one through. QA mishaps are indicative of security issues. That is plain and obvious.

Macros have been a long withstanding issue with the game and it's not like they affect other MMOs as well.

Macros exist in all MMOs true, but their existence in EVE is affecting their core end-gameplay. Not cool.

The fact that CCP took down their forum so fast is a good thing. The fact that it happened is not. Regardless, it's fixed now.

 They took it down, brought it back up, took it down again. It was not fixed.

Pretty harsh words for someone that has no idea about the severity of the attack.

Nobody knows the severity of the attack. Not me and I can assure you, not CCP.

Edit2:
Looking at some of the tweets by lulzsec it does appear that EVE was just a random target. EVE was one of many random sites today. Perhaps my I overreacted to be afraid of identity theft in the same way CCP may have overreacted in taking themselves off the internet. Still I am not going to give CCP a break on their many problems, especially those relayed to internet security. If it wasn't for things like the forum fiasco I would not have had these concerns.
Now I want to see what happens to the Atlas Alliance that is taking credit for the attack.