This is Producer/Director Yoshida.

This is just a preliminary report on the situation, but allow me to explain about current and future countermeasures.

Firstly, we’ve been receiving numerous questions and reports over the last few hours and confirmed unauthorised activity from third parties impersonating legitimate players, who have targeted a portion of the market place. We don’t currently have many reports of users affected but, in order to nip this in the bud, we are going to conduct emergency maintenance.

Please accept my sincerest apologies for the inconvenience caused to many of our players.

We are verifying the data and promise that everything will be kept secure.

This issue can only be seen in a small portion of Worlds, Zones and certain situations, so it will not affect players that were not logged in.

Once we resolve this issue, confirm security and recover the game, we will take action against the external fraud source and take further security countermeasures.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience that this may have caused.

We are not planning to perform any sizable character data roll backs at the current time.

However, we will arrange proper assistance for players whose data was affected.

We have obtained information on the route and IP address of the source and are proceeding with legal action against the party responsible.

This is Producer/Director Yoshida.

Please note that we will not be posting more detailed information on this issue as this could potentially assist similar fraudulent activities or attacks. Also, there are several posts in this thread and some users could get lost in the text, so we’ve put together a basic explanation on the emergency shutdown below.

Current Status

No. of affected cases: Approximately 200
Prerequisite: Those who were logged in.
Affected Locations: Parts of certain worlds only
Affected Area: Only portions of zones players were in
Only affected those who possessed more than several hundred thousand gil (Excluding gil deposited with retainers)

Only those who fulfill these conditions and have been targeted by fraudulent third parties have been affected.

Review policy: No large-scale roll backs/Each case will be individually addressed by the operations team.

Details on the Emergency World Shutdown

This current emergency maintenance seems to have been confused with the other recent scheduled maintenances. Please accept our apologies for the confusion this may have caused.

Immediately after the escalation of this incident reached me, the operations team proceeded to announce the shutdown procedure as a ‘scheduled emergency maintenance”.

This was going to notify players of the shutdown in advance. However, as this was an external attack, and so much more urgent, we decided that a world shutdown notification in this case could have actually increased the frequency of third party attacks and initiated an emergency world shutdown.

As this is an urgent matter, we will post further announcements on this thread and on the NEWS, and we have prepared an emergency flow. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

AFK'ED OUT IN ULDAH MARKET WARD, NO CLUE AS TO HOW LONG I WAS ON, LORD OF ONZOZO!!!!!!! WHY MUST I HAVE TO STAY AT WORK AND BE TORTURED NOT KNOWING!!!!!!

Just have rush log you in, careful though or he will end up getting you a new relic.