A ransomware attack on the "Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore" MMORPG last Friday destroyed 17,000 player accounts, deleting their in-game items and progress in the game.
Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore is a free-to-play old-school MMORPG developed by indie game publisher 'Gellyberry Studios.'
The title is
available on Steam as an 'Early Access' release, meaning it is still in an early development phase and relies on monthly subscriptions and community support to continue its development.
As announced on the game's official Discord channel, ransomware actors attacked the main server and encrypted all data, including local backup drives, demanding payment in exchange for a decryption key.
The game developers do not trust that paying the attackers guarantees the provision of a decryption key, so they decided to restore all affected systems manually.
"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," reads
the announcement.
"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."
