This past Sunday, Second Life experienced a “terrorist attack” where martial law (not kidding) had to be declared. No one got hurt, but it was an “attack” that ended up shutting down an entire economy. Apparently a programmer of some sort created spinning gold rings in the virtual world that once touched by users (who obviously will touch anything) began to replicate and chase people around. The worm script continued to multiply and infest the 2700+ servers Linden Labs operates. The immediate impact was a bad user experience in the form of lag and dropped connections for users. Linden invoked a sort of martial law to lock people out while they cleaned up the mess.

Although this terrorist attack didn’t necessarily instill fear or take lives, it did have a similar residual effect as 1^st life terrorism, the loss of production. I wonder how many businesses were impacted by such an attack, one so massive that it put the world at a stand still. I’m sure money was lost as this was one of the largest online game attacks in history. It makes me wonder how this sort of event will continue to evolve as our interactions with virtual worlds evolve. My guess is this was a typical “see if it can be done” hacker, but what will happen in the future when people start to use Second Life (or any other virtual world) in a more integrated (to your 1^st life) manner? Will virtual classrooms be shut down by people protesting the school? Will virtual economies be cut off because one country disagrees with another? Email distributed viruses that were once a “see if it can be done” sort of thing have now become channels for “real” terrorist activities, why not our virtual worlds?