'Atlas' Servers Hacked Again to Spawn Land Whales and a "Subscribe to PewDiePie" Message

Atlas' servers have once again been compromised with giant whales now appearing on land and a server message popping up which urged players to subscribe to PewDiePie.

It was only a few days ago that Grapeshot Games, the developer of Atlas, confirmed that an admin's account had been compromised which resulted in a server rollback that erased several hours' worth of progress. Whoever had the admin account was able to spawn tanks in planes in the pirate-themed MMO and caused quite the stir as players tried to figure out what was going on.

After those hectic events appeared to have subsided, it seems the problem still persists whether it's through an admin account that's still compromised or a larger hacking problem. Players and stream-watchers started seeing the same unusual events unfold with a group of players documenting everything that's going wrong. Some of those clips like the one below featured whales spawning out of the water and on the land, an event that would draw any Atlas player's attention to it.

Dragons were also spawned into the world to cover different areas, but players noticed the server messages had also been altered with references to PewDiePie. The popular YouTuber has been in a subscriber race against T-Series for a while now with people requesting that more YouTube watchers subscribe to PewDiePie's channel, sometimes hacking devices like printers to get their point across. Whoever is behind all the mayhem going on in Atlas used the server message function that usually alerts players of noteworthy occasions like server maintenance or patches to send a server-wide message saying "subscribe to pewdiepie."

It's thought that a group called Black Butterfly is behind the server attacks with another message appearing that said the group has struck again. It may be though that the hackers are simply playing into the speculation from the first hacking event to "confirm" who's behind the trouble.

In response to the issues, Grapeshot Games said that, like the first time, a server rollback was necessary for the NA PvP Network. It also said this second attack was a result of a "technical exploit," not a compromised admin account.

"As a result of the exploit, our Official NA PVP Network, The Kraken's Maw, had received a rollback to approximately 05:45 AM UTC specifically as we were able to backtrack precisely when the issue started to occur with our logging system," Grapeshot Games said. "All other networks were brought back online with no changes. The damage done was caused by a technical exploit which we have now protected against, no administrator accounts were compromised in this situation."

Grapeshot Games added that its investigation into the situation is ongoing and that action will be taken against any individuals or groups who are found to be associated with the attacks.