Released on 22 December 2018, the MMO pirate-themed game from Grapeshot Games has seen its fair share of hacking. Before the latest stunt pulled by hackers, players got to see tanks and planes spawning and confusing players.
But now things got ridiculous as dragons and flying land whales appeared along with a server message telling users to “subscribe to pewdiepie.”
The Atlas servers got hacked a few days ago after an admin’s account was supposedly compromised. The most annoying thing about it was that hours worth of progress were erased after the server rollback. Later, things got better, but the problem continued to appear, and streamers aired the weird events on Twitch (screenshot below).
The whales that spawned out of the water and on land or mid-air was definitely an attention grabber for players. In other areas, they saw dragons, and everyone saw the server message in which they were urged to subscribe to the famous YouTuber.
Why Did the Message Subscribe to PewDiePie Appear?
The YouTuber has been in a subscriber race to gather as many watchers as possible. Many people requested others to subscribe to Pewdiepie and even hacked devices to do it.
Suspicions point to the group called Black Butterfly which might have hacked into the Atlas servers to add the message. Grapeshot Games responded to these issues and stated that this attack was part of a technical exploit and not an admin’s account being compromised:
As a result of the exploit, our Official NA PVP Network, The Kraken’s Maw, had received a rollback to approximately 05:45 AM UTC specifically as we were able to backtrack precisely when the issue started to occur with our logging system. All other networks were brought back online with no changes.
The damage done was caused by a technical exploit which we have now protected against, no administrator accounts were compromised in this situation.
The devs also added that they would take immediate action against the individuals or the group behind this attack as soon as they conclude their investigation.
Robert J. Smith is still early into his career as tech reporter but has already had his work published in many major publications including JoyStiq and Android Authority. In regards to academics, Robert earned a degree in business from Fordham University. Robert has passion for emerging technology and covers upcoming products and breakthroughs in science and tech.
