According to ZDNet, a security researcher discovered an exploit in Minecraft’s code two years ago which could allow anyone with skill to hack into the servers at Mojang and shut them down easily. Basically, there’s a weakness in how their Minecraft-running server compiles and decompresses data, and if it’s overloaded, the server could run out of memory and crash.
The researcher, Ammar Askar, claims he informed Mojang of the exploit two years ago hoping it would be fixed. His letters and Emails were ignored, but he’d kept quiet about it until recently. What took him so long? “I don’t want to expose thousands of servers to a major vulnerability, yet on the other hand Mojang has failed to act upon it,” Askar says. “Mojang is no longer a small indie company making a little indie game, their software is used by thousands of servers, hundreds of thousands people play on servers running their software at any given time.”
Minecraft was big in 2013 as well, but maybe its ownership by Microsoft made him think “it’s now or never.” Now he’s actually posted how to cause the bug on his GitHub page, which will probably get Mojang’s notice. So far, no one has risen to the challenge and attempted to crash Minecraft. Once Microsoft gets wind of this (though one way or another), you can expect the bug to be patched.
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