Square Enix today announced, that a hacker attack on April 15th at approximately 09:00 pm JST led to a shutdown of all Final Fantasy XI servers. It took the company three hours to bring the servers of its popular MMORPG back online.

The company has submitted a report of damages to police authorities in Tokyo and is examining legal steps against the attackers. The so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks had already began on April 9th, before the servers collapsed under the heavy cyber fire last weekend. Since DDoS attacks rely on a large number of computers to deliver a very large amount of data to make the targetted server collapse, legally pursuing specific hackers might be difficult.

While the attacks have become irregular, they apparently still continue. As a first reaction, Square Enix is re-inforcing its network infrastructure and looking at legal options.

• MSN-Mainichi Interactive