Last week, the EVE Online team posted an update regarding an expoit with Starbase reactors. Well, the team has now posted details of their investigation, stating "we are working on the assumption that this bug has been exploitable since the release of player owned structures on November 24, 2004."

Our actions so far have included the eradication of 178 starbases that were exploiting this issue. Some had multiple reactors running in the bugged state.  We have also banned all those we have found directly involved and all accounts we have found to be connected to those players. The investigation is still under way and will take a while to conclude.

The full investigation will take weeks according to the post. You can read the full thing here or below.

Update: (12/19/2008)

Here is an update on the investigation into the Starbase reactor exploit that we are currently conducting:

1.  CCP has confirmed that this bug has been exploitable since February 2007.  Changes to the Starbases code from launch until February 2007 are minimal and very unlikely to have caused the bug.  So at this point we are working on the assumption that this bug has been exploitable since the release of player owned structures on November 24th, 2004.  We will therefore focus solely on looking at Starbases data in order to determine who has been using this exploit, and for how long.

2.  CCP has been able to restore older databases that show us that the bug has been exploited since at least January this year, but at a lower scale than in the last few months. The players involved then were the same ones that we found and banned recently.  We are now working on restoring data from 2006 which will take us several days.  It is uncertain if we will be able to have answers on that before holiday vacations.

3.  CCP has been able to access data from our old petition system.  We have been unable to confirm that a petition was filed in 2004, 2005 or 2006 pointing out this bug with Starbases. We urge anyone with information on who and when a petition on this issue was filed to contact us directly through the petition system under the Exploit Category. Alternatively, an email sent to community@eve-online.com with details on the matter would be much appreciated.

4.  The full investigation will take several weeks.  CCP will be in direct contact with the CSM to discuss this issue and we will provide information to the community as it becomes available. 

5.  We have done a thorough investigation on our staff members and CSM members and found no links to this exploit.

6.  Our actions so far have included the eradication of 178 starbases that were exploiting this issue. Some had multiple reactors running in the bugged state.  We have also banned all those we have found directly involved and all accounts we have found to be connected to those players. The investigation is still under way and will take a while to conclude.

 

We will continue to work hard to understand the overall impact of this exploit and how widespread it was.  We ask for your patience until more information becomes available.

Please discuss this news in this forum thread.