“At the slightest annoyance, it goes to war”: how the dispute over Minecraft ended up in court

A suspended prison sentence of four months and 3,000 euros to the civil party for one, a suspended prison sentence of eight months and 6,000 euros for the other, plus attorneys’ fees. The bill – a total of 12,000 euros – from the 13th criminal chamber of the Paris Judicial Court, is too steep for Cyril and Nicolas, two former players on Palladium, the very popular Minecraft game server created by Fuze III, a YouTuber specializing in this famous online. Game

But still, after a four-hour hearing, this Thursday, February 15, it is difficult to understand the reasons for the confusion that now two twenty-somethings have been convicted, for the first time after this procedure, for computer hacking, for obstructing the mechanisms. Allows blocking of terrorism amnesties for others.

Either the exact cause of this dissatisfaction “exists, but it is too embarrassing, or it is so futile that it is forgotten and this troll activity ends itself”, summarizes the deputy prosecutor Paul Simon in his requests. The Magistrate leans more towards the second hypothesis.

A rekindled flame

“I don’t blame Palladium,” says Cyrille, a former moderator who left the volunteer team at the end of 2021. a video. “It was second degree,” explains the tall man without explaining.

Before finally mentioning the dispute between the dismissed arbitrator and the partner of one of the administrators, a dark story that would then have led to “the entry into the war of Abfal”. It was this unsavory stranger who “rekindled the flame” of his resentment against Palladium. “He is very anti-Semitic. At the slightest provocation he goes to war,” explains Nicholas, who claims he was also threatened by an internet user who was careful not to reveal his identity.

In the summer of 2022, the dark feud degenerates. Then Palladium suffered a denial of service attack and raid against its Discord servers. Its users are targeted by messages promoting terrorism or obscene messages. The company Fuze III will also be a victim of swatting, malicious calls intended to provoke police intervention by a third party.

Business survival

So much malicious and toxic behavior, a common problem in video games that has already been condemned, is destabilizing the company. Fuze III, which employs five people, has seen its player count drop from 300,000 to 80,000. “The financial survival of that company is at stake,” warns David Bachalard, the company’s lawyer.

If one of the perpetrators of these attacks had already been tried, the cases of Cirilli and Nicholas were still pending. However, their roles are very different. The flaw was first discovered in the summer of 2022 in the Fuze III messaging server. “When I wanted to self-host on my own account, I discovered that the open source service used did not protect access to the configuration file,” explains this landscape gardener who is not far from Lily.

But instead of reporting the vulnerability, it would grab the administrator’s credentials, before downloading the database – players’ email addresses and their encrypted passwords – and sending them to relatives. “For me, it wasn’t like it was super-confidential information,” he defended himself, before admitting a “small mistake”: he didn’t activate his VPN “immediately.”

Unsolicited messages

Nicholas is alleged to have participated in a Discord raid coordinated by private groups. After managing to obtain a list of users from the palladium server on this messaging service, a process not reprehensible in itself, the young man created disposable accounts on the fly to spam internet users with private messages.

One of the hateful messages sent by the tape is projected into the courtroom. “The nightmare has just begun”, “We will have no mercy for you”, “You are at war”, we can read before seeing a photo of a beheading by Islamic State terrorists. Another message accused a developer of being a “hidden pedophile rapist of the Muslim Brotherhood”.

On the stand, Nicholas, very humble, no longer knows what messages he sent: he used disposable pseudonyms that he no longer remembers. “It’s a penis found on the internet, with drawings on it so it passes Discord’s filters,” he explained in court as an example.

“I was a bit of an idiot.”

“It was a special context, a completely crazy battle, I took part in it initially because I was a bit of an idiot,” he apologizes. The judges, however, seem to agree in general. For example, the police found a stressor in his computer, a tool used to test the strength of networks used in denial of service attacks – Nicholas, however, is not being prosecuted.

“Do you understand that we can question the reality of Abfal?”, a magistrate also asks. One evening, one of the Palladium managers is successively approached by the mysterious AbfAl and Nicholas. “To me it was the same person,” he assured the court: the same voice and above all… the same IP address.

“We have examples of conversations between them,” replied his lawyer, Leopold Heller, in the proceedings. So it was necessary to be very Machiavellian to simulate the debates over the years. “But there’s nothing stopping you from having separate Discord accounts on two phones,” the Fuse III rep replied. An issue that ultimately remains unclear as to the reasons for the feud at the end of the hearing.