EVE Online goes dark due to security issue

Many people were surprised when EVE Online went dark earlier today. I know I was a little disappointed when I couldn't get in and there didn't seem to be any word from CCP on what was going on. However, the Chief Operating Officer for CCP, Jón Hörðdal, came on a bit later and explained the situation:

At 10:25 GMT today we discovered an anomaly in the EVE Online Database indicating a potential exploit. Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 12:57 that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely dark while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed.

What we discovered was an indication that one of our databases was being accessed through a security breach. While some may feel that such a drastic reaction was not warranted, it is always our approach to err on the side of caution in order to protect the players.

We of course understand the effect and disruption this has had for our players and apologize for not having been able to explain to the community what was going on. In these cases it can often be counterproductive to containment to give out information while we are in the process of evaluating the scope of the problem.

Our task force quickly found the security breach and prevented that from being used. We subsequently found three cases of database actions being performed through the security breach but none of those affected other users than the one doing the actions. We can also confirm that no personal details such as users' credentials or credit card numbers were exposed through this incident.

The servers were brought back online at 22:00 GMT and we will of course continue to monitor the situation closely over the weekend and the following week.

Again we sincerely apologize for this disruption.

While I'm glad that they managed to fix the problem quickly, I really have to admit I wish they'd put the forums on a separate server. That way when there are problems that force them take the game off line, we have a way of finding out what's going on. The rumors I heard ranged from the servers being off line due to a server farm hiccup to the entire system having to be restored from backups and thereby players having to face a rollback and possible loss of training time.