Post-Grief Security

For a few months, Season 1’s whitelist felt like a lock on the door. Then came the grief of 27 October 2021 (see Aftermath of the 2021-10-27 Grief), and the friends found out the door had been open all along. The attackers had simply logged in as the whitelisted prop and another member, and prop’s account had OP. As he summed it up in chat: “they logged in as you and me”, “and my account had op”, “making whitelist nothing”. ^{1 2 3}

The clean-up produced the server’s first real security policy. kira reached for the tools already installed on the night of the grief, noting “we have ledger and rollback”, though he warned that rollback might not bring back entities. ⁴ On 7 November he restored a 20-day-old backup at the members’ request. The announcement that followed handed Carpet’s /player bots and /ledger inspect to everyone (with a plea to avoid popular usernames that attract griefers), stripped ops of real power, and kept backups as six three-hour snapshots. ⁵

The login system

The finishing touch came on 1 January 2022, the day after the griefers returned on New Year’s Eve (Griefers Return on New Year's Eve). kira announced a login system with a single global password, to be kept from absolutely everybody outside the server, used with /login. ⁶ The era is also remembered for a .mayday command that any player could use to shut the server down, with bans for anyone abusing it.

Players took to it. prop was briefly freaked out by the sudden password prompt, then declared “i love the authentication”, and noticed it only asked again when his IP changed. ^{7 8 9} The occasional lag-induced login timeout was the price of safety.