CCP Games' EVE Online experienced an unexpected 9-hour downtime yesterday after a security breach was detected in the game's database. Judging from the announcement from COO Hörðdal, thankfully it would look like someone was altering their own character to their benefit rather than trying to harvest other's data from the system.

CCP Chief Operating Officer Jón Hörðdal has issued the following statement regarding the unexpected interruption of service for EVE Online and its website on Friday, October 19.

At 10:25 GMT today we discovered an anomaly in the EVE Online Database indicating a potential exploit. Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 12:57 that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely dark while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed.

What we discovered was an indication that one of our databases was being accessed through a security breach. While some may feel that such a drastic reaction was not warranted, it is always our approach to err on the side of caution in order to protect the players.

We of course understand the effect and disruption this has had for our players and apologize for not having been able to explain to the community what was going on. In these cases it can often be counterproductive to containment to give out information while we are in the process of evaluating the scope of the problem.

Our taskforce quickly found the security breach and prevented that from being used. We subsequently found three cases of database actions being performed through the security breach but none of those affected other users than the one doing the actions. We can also confirm that no personal details such as users' credentials or credit card numbers were exposed through this incident.

The servers were brought back online at 22:00 GMT and we will of course continue to monitor the situation closely over the weekend and the following week.

Again we sincerely apologize for this disruption.

Regards,
-Jón Hörðdal
Chief Operating Officer, CCP

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