Atlas admin account hijacked to conjure whales, planes, and tanks

Some scurrilous hornswaggler yesterday gained access to an Atlas admin account with dominion over the piratical survival sandbox's North American PvP servers and used it to, in the words of developers Grapeshot Games, "cause some devastation." This appears to have included summoning a great many sea beasties as well as, ah, driving around in World War 2 tanks and raining warplanes from the skies. To undo the devastation, Atlas rolled those servers back to a backup from some five-and-a-half-hours earlier. Skulduggery may be supported in Atlas, even encouraged, but only approved skulduggery: no ducking, no bombing, no heavy petting, no tanks.

"Earlier today, an admin's Steam account was compromised and used to cause some devastation on our Official NA PvP Network," Grapeshot said in yesterday's announcement. "To be clear this was not caused by a hack, third party program, or exploit. We have taken the appropriate steps to ensure this does not happen again."

Ha, ha ha hooohhh dear.

What does some devastation look like anyway? Here's twitchy fella "BurkeBlack" being surprised by a warplane smashing into the sea by his ship:

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Here's him and his pals encountering whales galore:

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And "SniperNamedG" encountered tanks:

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Banter. Presumably those anachronistic machines are still hanging around the game's files from tests or prototypes or summat.

Grapeshot did pull all their official servers offline after becoming aware of the problem, bringing the PvE ones up several hours before finally resurrecting PvP. The NA PvP server rollback might have undone the devastation but they did also take several hours of progress from players.

In sunnier Atlas news, the game's dev kit is now live for people who want to tinker.

Atlas seems quite shambolic but it's still riding high in the Steam charts; people wanna pirate. Like the game which spawned it, Ark: Survival Evolved, it dreams a dream few other games do then is janky and grindy as all hell in realising that dream.