Atlas admin account hijacked to conjure whales, planes, and tanks

Some scurrilous hornswaggler yesterday gained entry to an Atlas admin account with dominion over the piratical survival sandbox’s North American PvP servers and used it to, within the phrases of builders Grapeshot Games, “cause some devastation.” This seems to have included summoning an important many sea beasties in addition to, ah, driving round in World War 2 tanks and raining warplanes from the skies. To undo the devastation, Atlas rolled these servers again to a backup from some five-and-a-half-hours earlier. Skulduggery could also be supported in Atlas, even inspired, however solely permitted skulduggery: no ducking, no bombing, no heavy petting, no tanks.

“Earlier today, an admin’s Steam account was compromised and used to cause some devastation on our Official NA PvP Network,” Grapeshot mentioned in yesterday’s announcement. “To be clear this was not caused by a hack, third party program, or exploit. We have taken the appropriate steps to ensure this does not happen again.”

Ha, ha ha hooohhh pricey.

What does some devastation seem like anyway? Here’s twitchy fella “BurkeBlack” being shocked by a warplane smashing into the ocean by his ship:

Here’s him and his friends encountering whales galore:

And “SniperNamedG” encountered tanks:

Banter. Presumably these anachronistic machines are nonetheless hanging across the game’s information from assessments or prototypes or summat.

Grapeshot did pull all their official servers offline after changing into conscious of the issue, bringing the PvE ones up a number of hours earlier than lastly resurrecting PvP. The NA PvP server rollback might need undone the devastation however they did additionally take a number of hours of progress from gamers.

In sunnier Atlas information, the game’s dev kit is now reside for individuals who wish to tinker.

Atlas appears fairly shambolic but it surely’s nonetheless driving excessive in the Steam charts; folks wanna pirate. Like the game which spawned it, Ark: Survival Evolved, it goals a dream few different games do then is janky and grindy as all hell in realising that dream.