Site Outage - Report

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Mat
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Site Outage - Report

Dear Community,

As you might have read on our community channels, our previous hosting provider, smarterasp experienced a ransomware cyber-attack on last Saturday, in which all their - almost half a million - clients were affected. They haven't communicated an ETA yet on when everything will be back to normal and are still recovering from the attack. As of this minute, our site on their host is still down, with our site databases unavailable.

Cyberattacks, while unfortunate, happen in this online world. Still, even though it started some 80+ hours ago and their service is still interrupted, we are yet to receive any official mail about the situation (even a notice) and they have decided to suspend their official communication channels (and helpdesk) during the second day of the chaos. So we don't know anything about the damages for sure at this point.

Due to the lack of communication and ongoing service interruption, we have decided to migrate our site to a new, much bigger provider, residing in the EU, using our last backups as a restoration point. Well, you're reading this post there.

What's the damage?

The attack fully affected our website, but not the game servers or the platform (where your data reside), as those are cloud-hosted. So most likely it should not have affected anything about your accounts. It is important that the site database doesn't have your passwords, as authentication is provided by our platform. 

If this indeed was a global ransomware attack on the provider itself, then it is very unlikely that the attackers have got any data from the clients' own databases. Ransomware is about quickly encrypting all data and asking for a ransom to decrypt them, not about data theft. They didn't target the data.  They wanted to block the service itself.

Still, we can't say anything for sure until smarterasp let us know if the attackers have possibly downloaded anything from any of the client and/or they give access to the appropriate logs. In which case we'll inform you immediately.

We are truly sorry for the inconvenience.

And... we are back online. Please let us know if you'd find rough edges (bugs, missing pictures, anything).