Link to the original news post
The Federal Republic of New Anders is a foreign polsim run on discord with a political system not dissimilar to our one run by its Discord Supervisor Tajworks. In the past, there have been significant conflicts between New Anders and SimDemocracy due to allegations of Tajworks engaging in unethical conduct in his capacity as Discord Supervisor, which have even resulted in ex-SimDem President Matt Cheney briefly declaring war, although these disputes have been laid aside since and the two nations have enjoyed peaceful relations for a long time now.
On the 1st of August, Mercutio Killer, a Supreme Court Justice within New Anders, submitted a report to the League of Servers of his nation getting “nuked” (i.e. the discord server infrastructure being deleted by malicious actors). The nuke was orchestrated by an admin, Gracky, who went on to add a “nuke bot”, a piece of technology used to automate the mass deletion of channels, messages, and roles, and mass banning of members, to the discord server, thus completely annihilating the republic’s critical infrastructure. While the reason for why they were originally given admin permissions still remains unclear, multiple sources (such as the League of Servers’ Secretary General) claim they had socially-engineered Tajworks into trusting them. The Discord Supervisor himself admits that giving them admin permissions had been a mistake of his (he was “desperate” for admins at the time) and has already announced he will be more careful when selecting staff in the future.
Gracky was not acting alone though, rather on behalf of a larger group, “FTG”. Even after having interviewed a multitude of sources, such as officials from New Anders, SimDemocracy, and the League of Servers, the Miasma Post still couldn’t find out what the acronym “FTG” might stand for, as nobody seemed to possess more than surface-level insight into the group. What is known about them though, is that they are a long-time terrorist group with a mission of infiltrating and then nuking vulnerable servers with underdeveloped security systems, such as New Anders which has historically always been struggling with manpower issues. Multiple of their members actually already were recognized as terrorists by the League of Servers even before this incident.
The reason for them specifically seeking out this target to attack in a high-effort operation that most likely took them multiple weeks or even months was their “ring leader”, SysKey, getting banned from New Anders some time back for a violation of its fundamental rules, specifically the one banning political extremism (in his case, that would be holocaust denial). Back then, the federal republic’s justice system allowed admins and moderators to ban or mute any person found in violation of these fundamental rules, not dissimilar to the “basic rules” system also employed in servers like Voices of Democracy. While New Anders has since opted to change to a system more akin to SimDemocracy’s where every single ban or mute requires a trial and subsequent verdict by a competent court, the ban was still legal according to the law at the time and thus upheld, even in the face of numerous complaints from SysKey and multiple friends of his.
The nuke went on to last multiple hours, as none of the government officials online at the time possessed the necessary permissions to remove both the nuke bot and Gracky. The server was decimated and practically all of its members had been banned until finally Discord Supervisor Tajworks woke up and took the natural first steps to ending the situation, i.e. removing all nukers from the server.
Currently having entered a state of rebuilding, the New Anders government has also sought out help from the League of Servers, which went on to assist them with finding the user IDs of the terrorists and recreating the infrastructure present in the server prior to the event. Furthermore, the League has also offered its assistance in further developing New Anders’ security systems, something that should be very apparent to anyone trying to join the server after the 3rd of August due to being interrogated by three different security bots at once when joining.
The full ramifications of the whole event still remain unclear just three days after its occurrence, but what can already be reported on is that New Anders has (of course) lost a significant portion of its userbase and thus will probably face even larger manpower issues in the future than before. Furthermore, some of its citizens have “fled” to other polsims including SimDemocracy, one of them even having decided to migrate their newspaper (“The Roadkill Post”) from New Anders to SimDem.
In the end, what all this will bring for New Anders, SimDemocracy, and the larger international polsim community in the a-bit-farther-away future is still very ambiguous, but it will for sure be at least somewhat interesting. Concerning SimDem's own safety though, the Zepz administration has, upon an interview request, already said they are working on getting all the people involved with the nuke banned on SimDem too.