Sonic-Style Grey Goo Cripples Second Life

Yet another grey goo attack in Second Life this weekend, this time in the form of Sonic-style golden rings that proved irresistible to grabby avatars. Slashdot says:

Apparently, most people are willing to touch an object they've never seen before and this invoked a worm script that was designed to multiply and spread across the 2,700+ servers run by Linden Labs in California, the game's owner. Many of the six hundred thousand active users experienced serious lag and lost connectivity to the servers, making it one of the largest known denial-of-service attacks in an online game.

Hee. Furthering this delicious soap opera is this post on the Second Citizen forums, in which one of the perpetrators links to scans of his court summons.

I did a little poking around at the forums, and the guy who claims to have done the Sonic rings grey-goo attack (and calls himself God of Gridcrash) is also one of the “Satyr 60”, a crowd of banned Something Awful goons linked to various previous griefings, mostly in the form of ugly builds.

Unless Linden figures out how to prevent this sort of stuff, they can expect the ranks of trolls, griefers and the generally displeased to swell with each mass ban. If they don’t get bored, and griefers often don’t, then SL can expect continuous guerilla attacks for the duration of its existence.

I find the idea of an entire universe in peril, a victim to the squabbles of its gods, highly amusing.
Grey goo attacks Second Life [Joystiq]