HACKING UP A STORM

So last week, there was a black hat breach of Second Life's user database.  The revelation has often led to confusion and rage, among Residents, many of them threatening (yet again) to abandon SL for good.  (Then again, since the news, the peak number of Residents in-world has remained around 10,000, as before.)

It's also led to something else, as it turns out.  Something extraordinary: 

Since the announcement of the breach, new user sign-ups have increased by more than 300 percent. 

As usual, this paradoxical growth spurt was first spotted by SL demographitrix Tateru Nino, and rather than link to her latest crunching of numbers like I usually do, I asked her to post here, with analysis and on-the-scene interviews.  (A role she's well-suited for, as a seasoned Mentor who volunteers to assist new Residents.)  Her report-- hopefully the first in a continuing series-- after the break.

New World Numbers

by

Tateru Nino

It's not exactly a secret that the Second Life web servers were broken into through the use of a security hole in a third-party piece of software, and that customer data in a peripheral database was leaked to some party or parties unknown. Linden Lab cleared all user passwords, forcing people through an arduous password reset process, albeit one that is unlikely to have been any less intrusive and troublesome.

Your name, address, phone number and so forth – in the hands of the black hats.

That's a cause for concern, isn't it? If you were considering signing up with an online service, and their customer database got cracked like that, wouldn't it make you think twice?

Then how do we explain these signup figures?

Over on the left there, we have the number of new signups, day by day from the 16^th of August. The day the news broke about the data theft is clearly marked there. We shouldn't reasonably expect much change until the following day.

And then we begin to rise. That number on the right there for the 11^th of September is a whopping 16,610. Second Life's highest daily signup rate to date was 6,444. (Average is 5,471.) That's two and a half times the previous record.

Are these really new people?

Well, some number of these people are alt (alternate) accounts. People who signed on with a new free account, because they encountered some other difficulty with the password reset procedure, or other persistent logon failure.

But that's not the whole story. New residents were coming into Second Life at such a rate that the orientation facilities for them had to be expanded by another 25%. These are genuinely new people, going through the steep learning curve, coupled with a sense of wonder.

But why? Why so many? Why now?

“There is no such thing as bad publicity, except your own obituary.” -- Brendan Behan

You've all probably heard that one – and you've all doubtless been turned off a business or a product or a service by this or that news story, or an advertising campaign that hits you in the wrong spot – so probably very few of you actually believe it. A quick recollection of recent headlines will net you any number of examples of what we might well consider to be bad publicity.

Well, the easiest way to find out why, was to simply ask the new residents. Sen Ely, brand new to SL, says he heard about it through the article the database compromise. Likewise, Scooter Jorda saw an article on it via the Yahoo! news service.

“Funny how that got us to join”, observed Ely.

Second Life has gotten a lot of press attention for a virtual world, recent, and while sex and gambling are always big winners in the battle for column inches, tragedy and disaster always seem to come up trumps. The security compromise and the potential acquisition of customer data put Second Life right in people's faces through their news outlet of choice. And honestly...as a species, we're just too darn curious not to give it a poke. Most of us don't value our RL names, addresses and phone numbers all that highly. Most or all of that information about us is already on file with direct marketing organisations, and has been for years.

With free basic accounts lowering the barrier to entry, and no credit card or payment information to risk, it's not hard to see why so many new people have become aware of Second Life and suddenly decided to try it out.

Tateru Nino (e-mail her here) is a well-known Mentor volunteer (considered by many to be the Mentors' unofficial leader) and marvelously-talented SL blogger.  Read my profile of her here: "The Heart of Tateru".

Update, 8:53pm:  On her blog, Tateru runs the latest numbers, which are, even more curiously, even higher than yesterday.  What's more, her informal poll of new Residents finds most of them here after reading about the security breach.

Comments

[JW Russell]

Well I can tell that Second Life got it's exposure in most dutch online news sources (national newspapers and such) due to the security breach.

So I know that a lot of people heard of SL by now in the Netherlands and I bet some got curious to find out what it is.

What I would like to see how the demographics of the sign-ups after the security breach are related to US and non-US sign-ups. I bet that there are more international sign-ups under them because SL got finally more exposure in non-english media.

Are those figures available from LL?

[Crissa]

Lots of true newbies wandering around, and mentioning the articles as why they joined. Wanted to see what was up - maybe they'll stick around, the world has been hopping, really.

Generally security faults only affect legacy users, not new users. It's like getting a prize - not a good one - but it's unlikely to happen again; especially something negative, as hacks can't be repeated if the company actually takes steps.

[Luke Buckland]

The reason i think you will find is because Second life has been on national tv in England regularly last couple of days, i know about a hundred people at my school signing up! I dont think it has anything to do with hack.

[Hamlet Au]

Tateru and I discussed that possibility, Luke, but other big media hits have never caused the numbers to jump anywhere near that high. (Though it's certainly a part of the spike.)

[Andy Vasiliev]

I'm one of the newbie-boomers, they had a huge segment on BBC Breakfast on British television yesterday morning which convinced me to finally join, though I was aware of it before yesterday.

[Tateru Nino]

The following day's numbers were 27% higher again, for reference. Where will it all end?

[Luke Buckland]

It would be nice to know what percentage of the people that joined in that time were english? is it possible for you to do that?

[Indy]

So, it's more than obvious to me why new user signups have sky rocketed. Am I really the only one who is considering that old users who could not resolve their email address/password issue just broke down and made new accounts for themselves??? I know MANY players who had to resort to this tactic. One in particular did just that in order not to miss her paid appearence in a fashion show scheduled that same night-she even spent over L10,000 preparing her *new* avatar for the event. She kept her first name but had to take a different last name. Let's get real. All of those new subscribers aren't all newbies-many just forgot their original email addresses and couldn't get it from the SL website because of the password issue. Take a poll on that one. Not impressed.

[Automatt]

Wow, maybe they should throw all the user data into the public domain every month!

[Aaron Levy]

Yeah, I think a lot of the new signups are current users making new accounts to replace the ones they lost all access to because of the password screwups.

[Kris]

conclusive proof that people are stupid. So the most successful thing to prompt people to sign up to SL so far? LL's appalling security being hacked and everyones details and cc's being compromised! of course! We should do this every month!

[Ben]

Yup I signed up after seeing the articles about the breach too. I'd known about SL for ages, but something just spurred me into doing it.

[Visitor]

I think that the point here is that despite the obvious fact that some of the numbers reflect old subscribers re-joining, the fact that new-user orientation was overwhelmed and had to be augmentated 25% is a pretty good indicator that a large percentage of the new sign-ins were in fact new users. Old users wouldn't face a steep learning curve or be in wonder and awe at what they were already familiar with...