By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus
Published Thursday 6th January 2005 14:18 GMT
Players of Electronic Arts' enormously popular simulated life game
are complaining that their artfully-crafted homes and mansions are
beginning to resemble the Twilight Zone, thanks to an artifact of the
game's design that causes hacks to spread like viruses from user to
unwitting user.
Entire neighborhoods of Sims are being mysteriously graced with
eternal youth, while some characters are finding all their needs
fulfilled by a single shot of magic espresso. Others no longer need
to empty the toilet after potty training their toddler. Some Sims are
being abducted by aliens when they glance through their telescope -
every time, instead of just occasionally, which is normal.
All this mayhem is the work of a community of experimenters wielding
hex editors, custom programs and reverse-engineering skills who began
mastering their own Sims 2 worlds immediately after the game's
release last September. The hackers share their weird science with
one another through public websites and forums.
The hacks are easy to install, but they aren't for everybody. Many
are cheats that eliminate challenges and obstacles in the game, while
others modify fundamental behavior of the virtual people that inhabit
the Sims 2 world. The "No Social Worker" hack, for example, allows
Sims to neglect their children without the state getting involved.
The "No Jealousy" patch lets them keep multiple lovers without
getting slapped all the time. Another hack allows teenagers in the
Sims 2 to get pregnant. As the game is sold, they can't even have
sex.
The first sign that some of the hacks were spreading to unwilling
users came in October, in the form of a dishwasher that did nothing
special, but was inexplicably named Candace on the screen. Candace
began replacing the ordinary dishwasher in the houses of users who
had never visited a Sims 2 hacking site, or knowingly installed a
hack. A torrent of other hacks soon followed, and users who wanted to
play the Sims 2 as it was designed found them as unwelcome as the
latest Windows worm. By mid-November, players were openly complaining
on EA's Sims 2 forum and other sites. "Please help, I'm afraid my
game is going to get ruined forever," one player despaired. "This
stuff is not funny."
Anti-virus Simware
It was the modders themselves who figured out what was going on. The
Sims 2 lets users build their own virtual houses from the ground up,
then populate them with carpeting, furniture, wallpaper and
appliances picked from the game's built-in catalog. If they build
something they're proud of, the user can export a house to a file
that can be shared with other players, primarily though EA's own Sims
2 website.
What nobody had realized was that hacked objects or behaviors would
be transferred with the house, and would supersede the game's
original functionality for anyone who installed it. So if you
download a house with a magic espresso machine in the kitchen, all of
your espresso machines in all of your Sims houses and neighborhoods
will become magic. If the house came from a game that has the "No
Jealousy" patch installed, your game will henceforth be free of the
green-eyed monster as well.
If you then export one of your houses and share it, anyone who
installs it will also be gifted with special java and open
relationships. And so on. As a user downloads and uploads more
houses, the hacks accumulate in the game like spyware.
The Petri dish for these unintended Sims 2 viruses is EA's own "Lot
Exchange," where over 27,000 user-created properties - many lavishly
detailed and elaborate - are available for downloading, with more
added every day.
At one point as many as three-quarters of the lots on the exchange
contained hacks, estimates Suzanne Walshire, a 57-year-old Sims 2
player from Pflugerville, Texas, and an early victim of the
phenomenon." It's extremely widespread," Walshire says. "Someone at
Electronic Arts was really shortsighted not to have thought of hacked
objects spreading this way. If they knew that their own objects would
download with a house, they would know that other objects would
download with a house also."
But the company says it was indeed surprised. EA declined interview
requests for this story, but last month, thirty days after the
initial complaints rolled in, the company finally issued a warning
about the spreading hacks on its Sims 2 forum. At the same time it
announced that it had reprogrammed the exchange to identify any lots
containing modified objects or behaviors, and to allow users to see
all the elements in a property before installing it. "Our community
continually surprises us by their creativity and dedication to
pushing the game's limits further then we ever dreamed possible!,"
the company wrote, by way of explanation.
"I think the response wasn't exactly timely," says a Sims 2 hacker
who asked to be identified by his online moniker, Jfade. By then the
community, fearful of being blamed for the issue, had already
developed its own solution. Modders took a page from the anti-virus
industry and created a central list of identified hacks, their names
and checksums, then wrote programs that can scan a user's Sims 2
directory and isolate suspect files. "It allows them to see more
details about the hack ... and then they can either move it out of
the downloads directory or delete it," says Jfade, who authored one
of the programs, called the Sims 2 Hack Scanner and Lister. "I knew I
wouldn't want to have these hacks, and in the process found out that
I had quite a few."
It's possible such scanners will someday become as indispensable to
networked Simmers as anti-virus software is to Windows users. So far
the hacks that are spreading are designed to be harmless, but there's
nothing keeping a new and uncommonly twisted breed of malware writer
from taking the stage, producing viruses that spread through the
exchange to corrupt thousands of tiny simulated worlds.
An empty trailer home could carry an invisible hack that makes the
game unplayable... at least until the user tracks it down and deletes
it. Walshire, still a loyal Sims 2 fan, dreads the day when black
hats take on the Sims. "I can't see why someone who was malicious,"
she says, "couldn't accomplish some really nasty things."
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