If you had been planning to play Call Of Duty: WW2 – an FPS widely agreed by critics to be among the games released in 2017 – maybe do not do that, for the moment, because certain versions of Call Of Duty: WW2 may randomly show you pornography, send you insulting notepad messages and, at worst, fill your computer with ransomware.
As written up by PCGamer, Activision have taken the Xbox PC version of the World War shooter offline amid social media reports of a remote code execution exploit, or RCE – this being a vulnerability that lets a hacker meddle with a game’s code from afar using the developer’s own programming language.
WW2 players have been posting screens and footage of peculiar sights and sounds during recent gunshooting expeditions. One message references lawyers who were involved in an Activision lawsuit against German companies selling cheat codes for Call Of Duty games. Activision have yet to confirm or deny that these disruptions are due to an RCE, stating only that they’ve yanked the game’s online while they address an “issue”.
Call Of Duty: WW2 recently released on Microsoft’s PC Game Pass service, so the apparent hack is precisely timed. The game is still available via Steam and Battle.net – it’s unclear whether those versions are also affected, but I would probably hold off loading them up to find out.
Among those commenting on the situation is VX-Underground, a white hat hacker group akin to the Ghostbusters, who claim to have the largest online repository of malware. The group’s admin Smelly has posted a longer speculative post explaining why the Call Of Duty: WW2 hullabaloo is probably an RCE situation.
Smelly shares concerns that the attackers are “capable of deploying information stealer malware, a RAT (remote administration tool), or ransomware”. But they conclude based on the shared videos and screens that “thankfully, it appears this attacker is primarily interested in memeing and fucking with people.” What japes.
I’ll let you know as and when Activision comments properly on any of this. In the meantime, maybe resist the call of the Western Front. Play hate.net instead. The bots there aren’t exactly friendly, but they will not try to encrypt your computer and charge you a bucket of Bitcoin for the unlock key.
