Hello 2025

Jan 17, 2025

Happy New Year, everyone! 🎉 This is the first update in the new year, and it may not bring as many exciting news regarding the game, but I think its time to give an update.

Improved Vulnerability Scanning

I already talked about the feedback regarding the vulnerability scanning logic. From what I heard was that it was hard to understand, so I've worked on an overhaul.

Theres three new scanners replacing the old ones:

Version Probe

Provides you with a general overview on how a system may be exploitable. Gives only a general overview nothing more

Vulnerability Scan

Checks for vulnerabilities that the software may have. the number of vulnerabilities you are able to determine depends on how good your cracker is and the kind of vulnerability. So generally speaking: better cracker more vulnerabilities.

Once you have found the vulnerabilities you can use a NPC to see if it may be already known or if its an unknown vulnerability.

If the Vulnerability was reported there you get a bunch of information such as how risky it is to use it, the severity and when and by whom it was found.

If its not yet known you can use the third scanner (Deep Scan) to learn more about it

Deep Scan

The Deep Scan shows all the facts regarding the vulnerability, giving you a solid basis on deciding wether its worth exploiting this vulnerability or not.

With the information gathered by the deep scan you can now do two things:

  • Keep it to yourself: Use the exploit for personal gain, share it with friends etc.
  • Report it: Share with the NPC to earn a bug bounty but also making the info available to others searching for it.

But theres another catch!

Running a Deep Scan or Vulnerability Scan has the chance of your actions beeing detected. If this happens you are either reported to the owner of the system, or listed by a central authority for a bounty.

This system should allow you to make a lot more strategic decisions.

Changes in the Background

Improved Game Content Management

Over the past few months, I’ve been wrestling with the CMS system. It had problems and with every game update it let to more pain. I thought about scraping it all together but I really liked the separation of game content into another system so you can modify it easily. So, I took the plunge and replaced it with a custom admin backend. This new system is lightweight, straightforward, and does exactly what it needs to—no more, no less.

Admin Backend UI
A look behind the scenes

The transition was surprisingly smooth thanks to the domain-driven approach in the game’s backend. Once the new admin panel was up and running, I disconnected the CMS without much fuss. The backend now pulls the necessary data directly and updates the game’s entities seamlessly. It’s a big relief to have this out of the way!

Cluster Problems

Additionally larger problems with the cluster showed up that took way to much time to solve.

I had the plan of finally migrating the mail server to the cluster to be able to send out more keys and mails. This however lead to a major problem where the cluster would stop working all together. This meant a lot of headache, updates, and no final solution for the mail server but the game server is working as expected. This means however that the limit to the number of mails that I'm able to send still is on, and theres no final solution on this topic yet.

Thats all for now, more will follow soon!

Tobias