)
The Attack That Changed Everything
Just this past week, a hacker attacked our website, DDoS-ing the entire platform and shutting it down for a couple of hours until we were able to bring it back online. But the downtime was only the beginning of our problems.
To finish it off, they exploited loopholes within our trading and marketplace ecosystem, giving themselves hundreds of millions of Bantobux and flooding the market with hundreds of thousands of cheap listings. A move that temporarily disrupted the economy.
The only saving grace was that few people were on at the time to take advantage of the situation.
The Root Cause: Features vs. Security
The reason for this was that we prioritized the fun parts—building application features—over the less exciting but critical infrastructure and security work. This is a mistake many growing platforms make, and we learned it the hard way.
Since then, we've added more robust protective measures and will continue to tighten security as we scale, ensuring we can build and grow our user base without compromising security.
Lessons Learned and Moving Forward
We're not sure where this hacker came from or how they found us, but they did a great job in pushing us to impose things we had delayed for a long time.
As things progress, we'll continue to keep security as airtight as possible to provide a fun experience that doesn't compromise other players' enjoyment, whether it be through:
- The economy itself
- The gaming experience
Community Support and Transparency
If you find anything broken, please don't hesitate to send us an email or a Discord message. We're always available to chat and appreciate our community's help in identifying potential issues.
A Message to Our Uninvited Guest
And to the hacker, putting the Bee Movie Script where you put it is an absolute unc move. You could come up with something better! Leave your Reddit references back in 2016 (nearly a decade ago!), where you found them.
This incident serves as a reminder that security should never be an afterthought in platform development. We're committed to learning from this experience and building a more secure environment for our users.