NCSoft's forthcoming Lineage III MMO's code has apparently been compromised by 7 former employees, according to Digital Chosunilbo.
The employees have been accused of disclosing the game's code to an unnamed Japanese game company and the incident is being investigated by the Seoul Metropolitan Police. They also are accused of disclosing the game's design in September.
The article also alleges very serious management problems in the unit at NCSoft with 90 employees quitting in the wake of the removal of their supervisor.
An NCSoft spokesman estimated the damage at 1 Trillion Won (about $1 Billion).
Ouch, ouch, ouch.
Now the damage estimate is probably a "bit" high. However, the design and architecture of an online game could be very valuable to a competitor.
Since many Western MMOs are running in the tens of millions of dollars, the value of this code is quite high.
The question that immediately follows is - did NCSoft adequately protect this data? Software that costs many millions of dollars to develop should be protected against disclosure by employees and certainly should not be freely available to the development team.
Regrettably, there have been a number of code compromises out into the "hacker underground" that have been admitted to. Industrial espionage probably happens more often than anyone wants to admit and rarely gets detected or prosecuted.
There are no magic bullets. Hire trustworthy employees, don't make data available to people who don't need it, track who has had access to what data in case a prosecution is necessary.
source:
PlayNoEvil Game Security, Game Cheating, Gold Farming and RMT News & Analysis
Pretty much copy pasted. Who thinks this will have an affect on Aion? My friend reckons if the stolen material isnt recovered, that could mean a lot of trouble for ncsoft, which "gg[s] L3/aion"
Thoughts?