On Sunday afternoon a large number of highly-populated World of Warcraft servers became a target for hackers. They used a bug in the game to massively kill players and NPCs in the cities of Orgrimmar and Stormwind. The crisis was resolved by Blizzard around midnight Polish time.
According to information provided by the WoW Insider website, on Sunday afternoon a large number of servers in World of Warcraft fell victim to a hacker attack. If you've ever tried to imagine what the capitals of the two most important factions in Blizzard's popular MMO - the Covenant and the Horde - would look like after killing all the heroes and NPCs present in it at the same moment, you got your answer yesterday.
Hackers were exploiting a bug in the game that, according to one WoW user, allowed them to run forbidden scripts and use the "Aura of Death" spell based on them, which kills all characters within a certain distance of the thrower. One of the videos posted online shows a level 1 priest killing players around him at the entrance to the city of Stormwind.
Blizzard announced that the bug had been fixed around midnight Polish time, announcing a thorough investigation into the causes of the incident. Earlier, player activity on many servers (mainly Argent Dawn, Tarren Mill, Ragnaros, Draenor, and Twisting Nether) had been destabilized for hours. During the height of the attacks, characters present in Orgrimmar and Stormwind were dying every two seconds for about an hour, including character ghosts appearing in graveyards.
We must admit that the hackers chose the right moment to carry out the action. On Sunday afternoon, a large number of players were certainly present in the world of Azeroth, especially after the release of the Mists of Pandaria expansion pack, which hit nearly three million players and brought the number of subscribers to the popular MMO game to 10 million anew.
