Digital plague hits online game World of Warcraft.


A digital virus spread by terrorists left bodies on the streets and cities quarantined by the government.


Fortunately, the epidemic was not real, but the aftermath of an inadvertent digital plague caused by a simple change to the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game, World of Warcraft.

The change? Giving a monster the ability to curse in-game avatars with a self-propagating, albeit temporary, disease. While the developers only intended the disease to affect the group of characters fighting the monster, the infectious malady quickly became a tool in the hands of malicious players known as griefers, who found ways to bring the digital virus into heavily inhabited areas of the world.

For a week, the efforts of malicious players left behind massive casualties, made cities nearly uninhabitable, and became a reminder of the uncontrollability of self-propagating code.

The plagues started on September 13 after Blizzard updated the game to include, among other new content, a dungeon known as Zul'Gurub. In the heart of that dungeon sat Hakkar, an in-game demon, that cursed any characters who attacked it with Corrupted Blood, a damaging curse that spreads from player to player.

The disease would have not spread from the original dungeon but for the efforts of griefers. The online roleplaying game equivalent to terrorists, griefers would teleport their characters to inhabited areas or used their pets as plague carriers to spread the disease to the general population of a server, according to postings on various community sites.

Griefers have taken advantage of other loopholes in online games. In World of Warcraft and Everquest 2, for example, some malicious players have used time-delayed curses to turn their characters or pets into virtual bombs, teleporting to nearby inhabited areas just before the curse went off, affecting everyone in the area.


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