Second Life has attracted legions of players because the game allows them to participate in a virtual economy without much risk. But that was before hackers broke into the virtual world's database and exposed personal information and credit card (albeit scrambled) numbers of roughly 650,000 users.

Linden Lab, creators of the 3D virtual world, went into damage-control mode and required all users to change their passwords. It's not much, but it's the least the company can do as it only knows the size of the stolen data, not the specifics.

As expected, Second Lifers are not happy with how things turned out. They are one in saying that the security breach might lead to cases of identity theft. What makes things worse is that some users find Linden "unhelpful" when prodded on about the details of the "attack". This prompted Second Lifers to storm discussion boards to air their frustrations on how Linden has badly handled the incident.

In defense of Linden, CEO and founder Philip Rosedale said, "We don't have any positive proof that anything was taken, only proof that someone was logged into our system. We erred on the side of caution in informing users as soon as possible."

Linden is working to change the procedures so that less personal info would be kept in the database. Sensitive data would be protected by stronger encryption.

At this point, there are no evidence that the personal info and credit card numbers have been used and abused.

Rosedale added, "We would compare our performance on this with anyone who has suffered a similar security breach."