Top Mud Sites Forum - View Single Post - Fighting Back: Exploits, Vulnerabilities, Hackers.

Molly · 02-05-2005, 05:54 AM

1. I guess the main thing to think about is to be very careful about WHO you let into your shell.
Never hire coders 'from the street'.
Never give anyone shell access at all, unless you know them well in RL, or have worked with them for a long time on line, and know that they are trustworthy, that you get along personally, and have basically the same goals for the Mud.
And make sure that your shell security is high.

2. Apart from shell security i'd say that the biggest danger of a Mud going bad is cheating and/or corrupt imms. Again it boils down to who you trust with an imm char. And if, despite your precautions, you end up with a bad egg in the imm basket, slam down on it hard. Throw untrustworthy imms out immediately. No second chances, they'll most likely abuse those as well.

3. As for the players, I think rumour mongers are the worst. Rumours spread incredibly fast in a mud, and if they are malicious ones, they can be really detrimental to the society, because they affect player relations and break down trust. A certain type of players seem to like to spread malicious rumours or blatant lies just out of spite, best keep an eye on those.

4. ddos is hard to protect against, even big companies have had their websites brought down by this. We had a couple of rogue players ddos the mud some years ago after getting into a brawl with some other players, and in the worst case, (which happened on a friday night when the coder was away for the weekend), the mud was down three days. After that extensive measures were taken to make the server more safe against attacks, and they in turn have lead to some secondary technical problems that are a pain in the ass.

5. Bad scripting or badly balanced features can lead to a lot of grief, if a few unscrupulous players find out about them before they can be fixed, and take advantage of them on a massive scale. (This is reasonably easy to remedy once you get aware of the problem, but you must know that it exists, before you can do anything). Try to get your players to report all bugs, it helps a lot.

02-05-2005, 05:54 AM	#4
Molly Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Sweden Home MUD: 4 Dimensions Posts: 574	1. I guess the main thing to think about is to be very careful about WHO you let into your shell. Never hire coders 'from the street'. Never give anyone shell access at all, unless you know them well in RL, or have worked with them for a long time on line, and know that they are trustworthy, that you get along personally, and have basically the same goals for the Mud. And make sure that your shell security is high. 2. Apart from shell security i'd say that the biggest danger of a Mud going bad is cheating and/or corrupt imms. Again it boils down to who you trust with an imm char. And if, despite your precautions, you end up with a bad egg in the imm basket, slam down on it hard. Throw untrustworthy imms out immediately. No second chances, they'll most likely abuse those as well. 3. As for the players, I think rumour mongers are the worst. Rumours spread incredibly fast in a mud, and if they are malicious ones, they can be really detrimental to the society, because they affect player relations and break down trust. A certain type of players seem to like to spread malicious rumours or blatant lies just out of spite, best keep an eye on those. 4. ddos is hard to protect against, even big companies have had their websites brought down by this. We had a couple of rogue players ddos the mud some years ago after getting into a brawl with some other players, and in the worst case, (which happened on a friday night when the coder was away for the weekend), the mud was down three days. After that extensive measures were taken to make the server more safe against attacks, and they in turn have lead to some secondary technical problems that are a pain in the ass. 5. Bad scripting or badly balanced features can lead to a lot of grief, if a few unscrupulous players find out about them before they can be fixed, and take advantage of them on a massive scale. (This is reasonably easy to remedy once you get aware of the problem, but you must know that it exists, before you can do anything). Try to get your players to report all bugs, it helps a lot.