Duet Night Abyss Devs Issue Official Statement About Recent Malware Incident Following Game Update

Following the March 18 Duet Night Abyss update, players of the free-to-play action RPG reported that the update included malware. Some of these reports can be found on Reddit, like this one, which shows a quarantine issued by virus software for a detected trojan.

Today, the DNA team posted a response detailing what they’ve been doing to deal with the “cybersecurity incident”, stating that the “root cause” was a “malicious attack originating from a specific region, targeting [their] internal office systems and live servers”. The post also states that “persistent attempts to continue the attack and spread misinformation” occurred following the breach.

The post also contains a timeline of Pan Studios’ actions regarding the issue, beginning with a hotfix and ending with the deployment of an emergency update to remove the malicious files. The devs also informed players as to the measures implemented to prevent this from happening again. This includes things like real-time monitoring, closing non-essential access channels, consolidating external access ports, and the like. The post also notes compensation available to the players being distributed today.

As for player response, it seems at best cautious. One post from someone claiming to work in cybersecurity states that a statement released by the company regarding the issues yesterday downplayed things. The Redditor also goes on to note that the measures mentioned in the announcement today indicate that the game’s initial security was weak. He also notes that he’d like the company to let players know if any of their personal information was accessed.

The Redditor also mentions that players might benefit from playing via Steam instead of the company’s launcher. They admit that they’re not sure if Steam scans for this, but it does add an extra layer of buffering. Interestingly, I’d actually checked Duet Night Abyss’ current player base on Steam, and the game is hovering between 300 and 400 concurrent players, making me think most players never bothered to move to Steam when the game finally launched there.

Of course, players can take their own measures, making sure their virus software is up today, not providing information to questionable sites, and the like.