back to article Kim Jong-Un shoot-em-up Glorious Leader! yanked

Game developer Money Horse Games has blamed vandals – supposedly inspired by the recent breach against Sony Pictures – for hacking into development servers used for a game featuring Kim Jong-Un and irreparably trashing its data. Glorious Leader!, a shoot-em-up, was due to feature North Korea's leader squaring off against the …

  1. Pen-y-gors

    Sums it up really

    "Is it really likely that the developers had no backups of its source code and other data?"

    How difficult is it to schedule a daily backup? To be fair, completely bullet proofing every computer is virtually impossible, but would you want to buy anything from a 'professional' IT developer who couldn't even manage a daily backup?

    1. dogged

      Re: Sums it up really

      the phrase "seriously wtf SOURCE CONTROL people" springs to mind.

      1. Oninoshiko
        Facepalm

        Re: Sums it up really

        While it's horrifying, it's not something I haven't seen. It's completely believable that they don't have backups.

    2. DropBear
      WTF?

      Re: Sums it up really

      I cannot possibly imagine this being true; I'm the single "developer" of a modest piece of obscure code (in quotes 'cause I can't code to save my life on PC - chips are another story) and even so I'm using Git - not even for backup, I just can't fathom how one could develop software without any version control. Seriously - you screw something up proper, and have zero ways to back-paddle?!? BULLSHIT. Incidentally, that also means I have the full code (current and past) on three different computers, including the server - quite improbable to lose...

      1. Danny 14

        Re: Sums it up really

        if backup was a USB or NAS drive then it is conceivable that these were trashed when the hacker got access to the server. Then again you would imagine that it is a VM rather than physical server so the VM should be backed up (and surely the HOST isn't accessible from the guest?)

  2. Bob Wheeler

    FTFY

    "You'd be amazed how often users lose whole chunks of important, businees data because they don't backup,"

    1. Amorous Cowherder

      Re: FTFY

      Even more surprised when you learn how many IT people lose important business data 'cos backups weren't checked!

      "It's not a backup unless it can be restored."

      1. DJV Silver badge
        Black Helicopters

        Re: FTFY

        Indeed, I'm just a one-man, self-employed, work from home, web developer but my backup solution verges on the paranoid as I've been bitten in the past:

        1) I have 2 local web/data servers - they have 4 hard disks in each of them. The main OS is on the smallest drive so that, if I need to reinstall or update the OS (Ubuntu Linux Server) from scratch I can do that on a replacement drive so that the original drive can be put back in if problems arise. The other 3 disks hold data only. The backup server can be converted into a main server quite quickly.

        2) A daily backup of the OS configuration files is made automatically via a CRON script (this helps if I need to swap which one is the main server).

        3) The backup server constantly replicates the main one's files using CRON scripts which run at (half) hourly intervals - the more important ones get the more frequent backups.

        4) The database does an almost instant update and the "home" page on all the web browsers I use (which displays links to all the sites on the servers and their live equivalents) displays a large red message if the two databases are not currently in sync.

        5) Once a day the entire database is backed up. Four times a day the database tables that contain my rather more important time recording information are backed up.

        6) Every hour a script runs which backs up anything changed on all the code in the past 48 hours and zips it up into a file on a different disk within the same server - this means that if I mess up something then versions that existed earlier in the day are still available. These files are also replicated to the backup server.

        7) After finishing work each day I run manually scripts which copy any changed files from the "web" working disk to another disk on the main server. A dated full (once a month) or incremental (all other times) zip file is made of the code files for the site. Some of these go back 10 years. Again, these will get copied across to the backup server as soon as it runs the associated backup script.

        8) Every 2 or 3 days I upload the latest versions of these files to an externally located server as offsite backup.

        Paranoid or what?!

        1. Bob Wheeler

          @ DJV Re: FTFY

          You may ask, half joking if you are "Paranoid or what?!", but at the end of the day, this is your work, your living at stake is the squishy hits the fan.

          Backups are in essence an insurance policy. No one likes to pay the remiumsbut when it's time to make claim you get waht you pay for.

          If the data is that important to you, your business then you put whatever backup policy in place no matter how paranoid it may seem.

          Some years ago I've had a guy complain that he had lost three years worth of work because he kept it on his local C: rather than on the network where it would have been backed up. In today's money he would have been taking in something like £80-100K p.a. I shrugged and told him to think of a good way for him to explain to his boss how he had just spaffed some £1/4M up the wall in lost work.

        2. Pen-y-gors

          Re: FTFY

          Not paranoid enough!

          Generally sounds like a reasonable set of procedures, but don't like the sound of the 'offsite server every 2-3 days'. My setup is rather less thorough, but does involve ALL daily/weekly backups going onto a NAS drive safely in another building. This allows for fires in the office, and potential burglary of office by someone who nicks anything that looks like a computer. Also do occasional extra backup to a USB drive which is only plugged in during the actual backup, to reduce the risk of nastiness affecting backups on the network.

          1. DJV Silver badge

            @ Pen-y-gors

            Yeah, I agree - the next stage is automate that offsite backup (with an easy to notice visual check if it ever stops working) and make it run at least twice a day!

            Getting there....

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Is it really likely that the developers had no backups of its source code and other data?"

    So, they were hoping to collect more, MUCH more, and when it didn't work, well, those pesky Norks strike again? Good material for Sony D-movie!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Publicity stunt

    Yeah so this obviously isn't just a publicity stunt to promote the game and bring in more funding.

  5. ukgnome

    If your data isn't in three separate location then you have no data.

  6. Billa Bong

    Was the video legit footage?

    If so I assume it's a game for the Amiga, SNES or something...?

  7. ScarabMonkey

    Air-gap backup

    ...I see an air-gap backup strategy in their future...

  8. J 3
    Joke

    Hm...

    To avoid legal trouble, should they choose to resurrect such worthy and advanced project (screen shot looks like something from the mid-90s), I suggest they name the basketball-playing character something like, say, Pennis Manrod or whatever? Oh, way, wrong genre.

  9. James 51
    Coat

    No off line back ups? Hope the admin is taking this opportunity to make a few sharp points (assuming that he doesn't have to fall on one).

  10. Mike Moyle

    So, apparently...

    ...this "lost" game wasn't the Money Horse that they thought they could ride to riches on?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bullshit

    They're lying, hoping to coattail on the public support for the movie. If they get a surge in donations from sympathic suckers they can finally start working on it, if they don't this provides a convenient excuse for why they never coded a single line.

  12. Nehmo

    BS, of course, but the theme is cute

    This is nothing more than a lame publicity stunt, as has already been pointed out. However, the game's theme is cute.

    I don't develop games, but my understanding is that the characters and the scenes can be changed at will. This game is just one of those generic games with some changes made. It looks like any number of other similar ones.

    I suppose any news story/situation of popular interest can be made into a game. Expect more of them.

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