Call of Duty players disabled by dangerous self-propagating malware
Hackers have reportedly infected one of Call of Duty’s most popular online games with potentially dangerous self-replicating malware.
A report of TechCrunch discovered that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was targeted by a worm that could automatically spread in online lobbies.
The game, which was released in 2009 but still has a passionate fan base, has been taken offline while publisher Activision conducts a full investigation.
Call of Duty malware
“Multiplayer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) on Steam was taken offline while we investigate reports of an issue,” a tweet of the official Call of Duty Updates accounts listed.
The issue was first reported in June 2023 by a user writing on the game’s Steam forum. In a thread, the poster noted that hackers “attack using hacked lobbies,” with an initial analysis to find the malware present in the VirusTotal online threat repository.
Further analysis posted in the Steam thread identified the malware as a worm, which can exploit security vulnerabilities in application code, meaning it can bypass typical protections around code injection. Once it has infected a game lobby, the malware can execute localized code and infect the machines of any user who accesses the session.
The issue appears to only affect PC versions of the game, but recent announcements encouraging backward compatibility may have made it a more popular target for hackers and scammers alike.
Players or anyone else who has access to the game since June 2023 are advised to immediately run an antivirus or other security scan.
Activision was the famous victim of a major cyberattack in December 2022 in which nearly 20,000 employee records, including full names, email addresses, phone numbers and office addresses, were stolen and published online.
The data, which the hackers claim was stolen from Activision’s instance of the content delivery network (CDN) Azure, was offered free online to all users of a popular hacking forum.
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