The PC version of Call of Duty: WWII has been taken offline after a surge of gamers claimed they were getting hacked while playing the game. Rogue players have reportedly been exploiting an RCE (Remote Code Execution) exploit to hack other players’ PCs during multiplayer games.
The 2017 title from Activision had arrived on Xbox Game Pass, a game subscription service run by Microsoft, just days before. The game is also available on console, but only PC players were affected by the issue, likely due to the game’s reliance on peer-to-peer (P2P) networking which hosts the game server on one player’s machine.
The exact cause behind the hacks is unknown. The Call of Duty team has announced that the PC version will be taken offline following “reports of an issue.” According to MalwareBytes, hackers were exploiting an RCE vulnerability to remotely access other players’ PCs during games, making quite a few changes:
- Opening command prompt on victim’s PCs
- Typing out mocking messages on Notepad
- Forcing remote shutdowns of affected PCs
- Changing desktop wallpapers
Note that this takedown only affects the Microsoft Store and Xbox Game Pass versions of the game. Interestingly, the game has been available to PC players via Steam since its 2017 launch date, but no similar issues have yet appeared. Hacking, however, remains a prominent issue in FPS games, especially the ones running on PC. There are rumours of Activision working on updating its “Ricochet” anti-cheat system, but it’s unclear whether the update will fix this particular vulnerability.
In the meantime, players using the Microsoft Store or Xbox Game Pass versions of Call of Duty: WWII are advised to uninstall the game and avoid playing it until Activision can release a patch to fix the issue. If you have the game on Steam, it’d be best to avoid playing the game for some time as well because there’s a good chance the exploit might get duplicated over to the Steam edition.
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