Dear Community,
Let us discuss what has caused this downtime in complete disclosure.
Two days ago a player on our server received a gift of an unusually large amount of gold. We were instantly made aware of this, began our investigation and quickly discovered that the gold was not genuine. Last night, we found an issue with the hardware and decided shut down for unscheduled maintenance. A little while after, our investigation on the gold showed us that an individual gained access to an account with modification privileges on the Anathema character database. As a result, we decided to immediately shut down all of our services to evaluate the damages, their extent and if this individual had more access.
Our System Admin and devs have isolating the breach, revamped our security, and reverted alterations. There was a lot of data to sift through and Anathema PvP is still under some investigation. Preferring to remain safer than sorry, we have kept the servers down until this afternoon to ensure beyond a shadow of a doubt that all is well. Anathema will return as soon as we are comfortable.
Before anyone starts to panic: We have secured the breach. Your data is safe (use the .account password command in-game to change your password, just in case), and any damage done has been discovered and reverted with no need for a rollback.
We have made contact with the individuals whom gained access, and they did not have the intention of harming us. Rather, they were more interested in testing our security measures. In fact, they have agreed to help us to find any remaining security breaches. As a result, we welcome Auya to the Elysium team who is tasked with making sure we are never in this position, ever again!
All in all, it has been a crazy 24 hours, but everything seems to be in hand. We will take further steps to secure our system as best as possible. While we very much doubt there will be any further issues from this event, we will let you know immediately if any should arise. The community is our primary concern, and we will not let pride prevent us from telling you the truth. Should we get ANY hint of a database leak, we will let you know immediately. However, as of now, we have no reason to be concerned this is the case. We will, though, take this opportunity to once again stress the importance of enabling your two-factor authentication. No matter what kind of attacks we may suffer now or in the future, 2FA will secure your account.
We thank you for your patience with us during the downtime, and hope today’s adventures in the world of Azeroth will make up for the time lost!
Elysium Staff
