I just want to say a few things to everybody coming back. First and foremost, no more discussion of the last Assist version. It's been talked to death on here, Battletracker and the official AA forums. AAO25.com was not re-opened to discuss what happened, it was re-opened to discuss the future of this game for those that wish to continue playing it.
With that said, I want to dispel any conspiracy theories and give you some hard information on what's going on:
- None of the other developers, including myself, work for any governmental agency.
- The only personal data ever used/harvested by Assist is the username, email address and password that you choose to enter into the program and/or into Battletracker. This information has never been shared with anyone for any reason outside the developers. Passwords are stored on the Auth server with a special SHA-1 encryption that includes a salting method.
- Assist was not shut down to "hide evidence". It was shut down to avoid abuse of the system and to prevent any non-relevant personal user data from being harvested.
- It's taken so long to bring back AAO25 and Assist because we have been discussing the best way to bring it back in a way that regains trust and ensures confidence in our users. Without you, our work is pointless. We didn't want to simply go back on the last update and let things go back to normal. We are fundamentally changing various features in Assist as well as introducing a TOS agreement that tells you, the user, what Assist is and what it does.
- Jonny has retired completely from the project. We all appreciate the work he's put into this program over the last 5+ years and he will be missed. He wished for me to post a public statement when this site came back online:
The latest version of assist (7.47) included a new anti-cheat feature that allowed us to search peoples computers for cheats or hacks, This was done via an authenticated connection to the authorisation server. When you downloaded 2.5Assist from our site it was on the understanding that it was an installation and management client for AA2.5, I believe that this gave us a mandate to access and modify files on your computer that are directly related to AA2.5 and extended this definition to include cheats/hacks that are specifically designed for use with AA2.5
Unfortunately this new anti-cheat feature was rushed and not properly thought through and contained serious security flaws that meant it could have potentially been used to access files that were not directly related to AA2.5. I am not a professional software developer and only do this as a hobby for free, as such I have no qualifications for this type of work and was bound to make a serious mistake like this sooner or later.
I want to assure the whole Assist community that this latest feature was only live for less than a week and was only ever used on a very small group of know cheaters, Where it was used I am 100% certain that no files that were not related to AA2.5 were accessed and I am 100% certain that no personal information or data or anything else not relating to assist has been compromised.
I soon as I came to realised what a security/privacy threat this could have become I acted immediately to shutdown the system to prevent it being abused and removed the authorisation server making it impossible for this feature to be used again by anybody.
There has been talk of Trojans, spyware and backdoors being used but this is not the case, This was simply a function built into the assist client that could only be accessed via an authenticated connection to the Assist authorisation server. With the auth server now gone this security flaw is now completely removed and unusable to I can assure all of you are perfectly safe now.
When our server hosting company found out about this they did not want to have anything to do with us anymore so the AAO25.com forum was taken down, Some of the admin team are now working to get the site back up so they can discuss a way forward with the community.
I however will no longer be involved in this project, I have made a mistake and have lost the trust of the community, I no longer trust myself to develop software and will not being working on anymore projects in the future.
Some of the other admins have expressed an interest in removing said features from assist and continuing the project but that is up to them and community to decide.