Is Second Life safe from hackers? Or is it at least safer than other
online worlds like Habbo Hotel, where a 17 year old kid stole for about
US$ 6,000 on virtual goods from another kid? Although innocent until
proven guilty, he's at least brought to court and charged for this
crime, so that makes hacking serious business.
DNBmedia, a Dutch company who is also the Dutch full-service partner of Linden Lab and has set up www.secondlife.nl, has the answer about security in Second Life. They are certain that this could never happen in SL, at least not by in-world hacking. About two weeks ago they started a hacking competition on one of their sims (read more here). The object was to hack into an in-world script stored inside a prim looking like a bar of gold, stashed away in a big vault. Getting to the prim was easy, but actually gaining access to the no-mod, no-copy, no-trans script apparently was too hard, or even impossible.
So, DNBmedia did a great job at actually blocking access, and has proven that Second Life is a safe place. According to DNBmedia employee Rickus Rodenberger:
DNBmedia, a Dutch company who is also the Dutch full-service partner of Linden Lab and has set up www.secondlife.nl, has the answer about security in Second Life. They are certain that this could never happen in SL, at least not by in-world hacking. About two weeks ago they started a hacking competition on one of their sims (read more here). The object was to hack into an in-world script stored inside a prim looking like a bar of gold, stashed away in a big vault. Getting to the prim was easy, but actually gaining access to the no-mod, no-copy, no-trans script apparently was too hard, or even impossible.
So, DNBmedia did a great job at actually blocking access, and has proven that Second Life is a safe place. According to DNBmedia employee Rickus Rodenberger:
"We
did everything that is deemed normal for security measures. The fact
that no-one could get in using a normal method, really shows that most
of the hacking is done by gaining access to an account. And that is
mostly due to people being careless with their account details."
When I talked to Mr. Rodenberger, I asked him if there was a back door, if it was a game. As he stated:
"No, this was not a game, there was no back door that we knew of. We considered this to be a serious test and treated it like that. Apparently SL is safe enough not to loose your inventory or rezzed objects or even your intellectual property rights to hackers."
So I asked Mr. Rodenberger what's next, after the hacking challenge. He said:
"Nothing concerning hacking anymore. We made our point and we can tell the world that SL is a safe place. However, we did still have the L$ 50,000 prize that we haven't had to pay to anyone. So last week's Thursday, at 4pm, a new competition started and we had a winner in under 4 hours! We stashed away 3 gold bars, hidden away on the 14 sims that we have developed so far. The person who found them first, won this follow-up competition, and of course the L$ 50,000. It was a big success."
As it seems, DNBmedia is quite dedicated to Second Life. In fact, they are a full-service partner of Second Life, so you can imagine that they were eager to show that Second Life is in fact safe, as long as you take your own precautions. Never give away your login details, and if you don't want to share the secret behind your designs with other residents, SL has plenty of tools and settings to prevent it.
When I talked to Mr. Rodenberger, I asked him if there was a back door, if it was a game. As he stated:
"No, this was not a game, there was no back door that we knew of. We considered this to be a serious test and treated it like that. Apparently SL is safe enough not to loose your inventory or rezzed objects or even your intellectual property rights to hackers."
So I asked Mr. Rodenberger what's next, after the hacking challenge. He said:
"Nothing concerning hacking anymore. We made our point and we can tell the world that SL is a safe place. However, we did still have the L$ 50,000 prize that we haven't had to pay to anyone. So last week's Thursday, at 4pm, a new competition started and we had a winner in under 4 hours! We stashed away 3 gold bars, hidden away on the 14 sims that we have developed so far. The person who found them first, won this follow-up competition, and of course the L$ 50,000. It was a big success."
As it seems, DNBmedia is quite dedicated to Second Life. In fact, they are a full-service partner of Second Life, so you can imagine that they were eager to show that Second Life is in fact safe, as long as you take your own precautions. Never give away your login details, and if you don't want to share the secret behind your designs with other residents, SL has plenty of tools and settings to prevent it.
Dixie Barbosa
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