FBI busts Lineage II hackers

NCsoft Austin today said an FBI operation--which included multiple raids from Virginia to California--has broken a renegade service that supported about 50,000 illegal Lineage II users. A spokesperson put the loss to the game's publisher in the millions of dollars.

The NCsoft statement today said warrants served on the operators at a company called L2Extreme will enable officials to "halt L2Extreme's operations while collecting further evidence in the course of the investigation." L2Extreme was providing its users with "unauthorized service and code" for the massively multiplayer online title, the company said.

"This group in particular was downloading our version of the Lineage II software from our servers, costing us close to a million dollars in realized bandwidth costs during the period it was operational," Matt Esber, NCsoft North America general counsel said. "We're extremely pleased that the FBI has worked with us so diligently to bring this particular case to its current state, and we want our customers to understand that we will continue to fight similar operations in the future in order to maintain the integrity of all NCsoft games."