Colleges can spend hundreds of hours — and thousands of dollars — designing ever-more-elaborate virtual campuses in Second Life, the popular online community. So it's a bit troubling that tech-savvy vandals can undo much of that work in a matter of minutes, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation recently discovered.
The ABC boasted one of Second Life's most expansive commercially run islands, but that didn't stop an unidentified gang from laying waste to the digital plot of land. "It looks like we've had some enormous cyberbomb set off on our site," said Craig Preston, ABC's head of technology, to The Australian. "Somebody has nuked us in some way, shape, or form, and they've obliterated almost every object on the site."
Most of the damage was repaired within hours, but the story isn't necessarily over: The broadcaster hopes to identify the assailants by poring over digital recordings of the vandalism that Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, might have on hand. –Brock Read
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