Grey Goo Attack..

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

A popular online multiplayer game ‘Second Life’ was shut down for a while when it was hit by a special purpose worm. The game allows the players to code the objects that can play role in the virtual game. Malicious users coded the object to self-replicate when any player picks it. The object in the “Grey Goo Attack” was a gold ring which kept on replicating eventually causing a Dos-type attack as the object occupied the server resources. The game creators had to shut down the server and remove the script to solve this problem and many valid users were left without scripting features for quite some time.

This is something new area of concern as online games are becoming popular.

The game producers had to think about such problems while designing such features.