Multi-player online role-playing videogame “Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore” has suffered a ransomware attack which saw the deletion of every player’s account and the loss of all characters.

On Thursday last week, the game’s official Discord channel announced that its servers had fallen victim to a ransomware attack that had encrypted data on its systems and local backup, and demanded a cryptocurrency ransom be paid for a decryption key.

According to the Discord post, GellyBerry Studios, the game’s indie developers, were not confident that the ransom gang would provide a decryption key even if a ransom was paid, and so they instead decided to rebuild their servers, and create new databases.

“All 17.000 user accounts and characters have been lost in this hack. BUT We will personally, manually restore every item, level, title, pet, etc. that was lost during this event when the servers are back up.”

It is obviously a good thing that no customer data was accessed, however one hopes that it was possible to identify how the ransomware attackers were able to breach their systems in the first place, and that measures can be put in place to prevent any follow-up attacks.

Players were told to contact “Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore” via email or direct message to request their accounts be recovered, and that everyone affected would be given a “Corrupted Wolf” pet as an “apology” for what had happened.

The game’s developers said that they were “truly sorry” for what had happened, and were taking measures to prevent similar incidents from occurring in future.  They said that these included:

• “significantly increasing” the frequency of backups
• decentralising offline backups for the characters and account databases
• putting a VPN in place for remote connection to the game’s development server
• creating a list of specific approved IP addresses that were allowed access to the development server.

On Friday 24 November, the game’s Discord channel announced that the game’s servers were up again, that players would be prompted to create a new account when they next launched the game, and that they hoped to begin restoring accounts and characters soon.