As many of you will hopefully already be aware, yesterday we suffered two different attacks, one here on the forums requiring a few hours of outage to clean up a huge mess, very shortly after the forums came back online, a new individual to the server exploited a bug on a recent reboot of the physical host which enabled them to login as if they were me, with the full benefits that come with my account, this resulted in then op'ing a number of players who went on to do an unknown amount of damage throughout the network.
As it currently stands, I have to assume such attackers have compromised all of our minecraft infrastructure, and as such everything has been isolated. My time for TotalFreedom is currently exceptionally limited, I have other projects currently which are significantly more important to me personally and to my and my companies goals in the future. It'll be 4-6 weeks minimum now before I can look into the incident in enough detail to assure files were safe.
With this in mind, combined with the recent break and lack of change and support after our recent break, I'm taking the difficult decision to permanently close the Minecraft server with immediate effect. We won't be re-opening any of the servers.
I have yet to fully decide what we will be doing with the Forums and Discord, however I expect them to start wrapping up over the coming weeks with further announcements to follow.
If we find that the files for the worlds aren't compromised and we can retrieve them, we will look to get these uploaded onto the World Download tool in the near future. My current intent is to ensure the World Download tool remains online for the remainder of this calendar year as a minimum.
It's been an absolute privilege to have taken on the owner role for coming up to 3 years now, and being able to see the server through COVID and a owner transition back then makes me exceptionally proud. I'm very aware of the positive and significant impact the server has had in some peoples lives, and I am thankful to all staff and contributors past and present, without you all we wouldn't have been able to make it here. It's been one of the most difficult decisions I've had to make, without TF I wouldn't be where I am in my personal and professional life, I owe a lot to TF and I can only hope my time as owner helped to pass forward some of the experience and gratitude I have towards the server for helping me as I was growing up.
I'll be moving on to new projects, many of you know I'm already involved in Mastodon and decentralised social media, it takes up a lot of my time and is something I've found I'm passionate for. I suspect I'll be spending some time in the Minecraft space, creating environments like what I had planned for TotalFreedom when I took over is still something I'm excited to be able to progress.
Again, thank you everyone from the bottom of my heart, without you all we couldn't have made it this far.
- Ryan
