Hacker jacks into Nexon game, causes a 'Koyuki apocalypse' by copy-pasting their favourite anime girl everywhere, forces 6 hours of emergency maintenance

I always enjoy it when someone with great power decides to use it for great mischief, rather than great responsibility. As is the case of the hacker that wreaked havoc in Nexon's online RTS, Blue Archive, late last week.

As spotted by Automaton, said hacker tapped into the game's systems to, and I am being fully serious, copy-paste the same anime girl over and over. Kurosaki Koyuki is a student players can obtain—a hacker prodigy with a mischievous streak. This event has been dubbed the "Koyuki apocalypse".

As shared by Jambo971 on X above, the hacker replaced recruitment banners with Koyuki, spawned a bunch of Koyukis in the game's cafes, and did this to the game's information page, replacing its title with "Nihahaha" (her laugh) and, you guessed it, more Koyukis.

This prompted Nexon to pull Blue Archive offline for six entire hours, per this official notice, which reads: "We sincerely apologize for the concern caused by the abnormal display of certain content on August 31 (Sun). The investigation into the situation has reached its final stage, and we would like to share the details of the incident along with the measures taken, prevention plans, and compensation."

The post goes on to explain that "The Blue Archive client checks environment settings from the CDN (Content Delivery Network) when launched. These settings are created and managed separately from the game, but records of external access were confirmed … Some settings were altered, redirecting to 45.94.31.77 (Netherlands), which caused the issue.

"Symptoms included abnormal banners, the appearance of Koyuki/Miku"—oh, yeah, Hatsune Miku also showed up later—"in Cafe content, and specific YouTube content being displayed. A thorough internal investigation confirmed no other irregularities beyond these."

In fact, Nexon's keen to emphasise that the hacker didn't do anything nefarious, and couldn't even if they wanted to: "We confirm that players’ accounts, game data, and payment information were not affected, as they are operated in a separate database and always revalidated by the game server."

Nexon will be compensating players for the six-hour maintenance with the following live-service doohickeys: A 10-Recruitment Ticket, 500 AP, 150 Tactical Challenge coins, 3,000 Expert Permits, 300,000 Credit Points, and seven Lesson, Bounty, and Scrimmage Tickets.

I mean, listen—in a professional capacity, I do not think you should hack (online) videogames. It's against the law. It can get you in trouble. However, a quiet little part of my mischievous soul finds this whole debacle, and ones like it, extremely funny; no serious data was lost, which helps. There is a tiny little Koyuki in all our hearts, and she is saying nihaha.

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