Increasing Grid Security Measures

Posted By: Vincent Sylvester
Posted On: 2021-05-07 02:47 PM

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Protecting our residents from potential sources of harm is a prime directive of the ZetaWorlds administration. In most cases this takes the form of targeted removals from our systems, with some extreme cases requiring more drastic measures. We always try to keep disruptions to a minimum and be as targeted as we can with access restrictions. Unfortunately as we have received an increasing number of reports over the past few weeks we had to resort to broader restrictions against offenders. This took the form of updating our automated systems to be more aggressive towards offending sources and resorting to temporary or permanent restrictions earlier.

We continue to monitor the situation and are evaluation both additional measures and ways to be more selective, but you may have already encountered some of the more drastic measures we have put into place. The major one of which was increasing the hitrate of our automated system to flag malicious traffic to our infrastructure and restrict access from those sources. This is something we will continually tweak to adjust to the situation we face, but it is likely to at least stay more in line with what it is currently set to. Meaning plainly that there is an increased likelihood of entire grids being restricted access to ZetaWorlds if their traffic is out of the ordinary or particularly malicious in nature.

Additionally we have elected to look into the abuse originating from various of the dynamic dns services some grids use now. With the most egregious offenders abusing such systems to hide themselves behind ever new IP addresses making it near impossible to create permanent restrictions. The solution to outright remove access from grids that use such services is not in our interest so we have elected to only remove access of specific providers of such services that lack a proper setup and workflow for reporting and dealing with abuse. This is a step we did not want to take, but seeing as the reports have increased at an alarming rate and these services not policing their systems even after repeated information has been fielded by us, there really is not much more we can do. Our aim is, and has always been, for the metaverse to be open and promote diversity, but much like not being tolerant of intolerance, we cannot maintain being open to grids with the intend to be a detriment to us and our residents.