Call of Duty: WWII Goes Offline After RCE Exploits, Allowing Hackers to Completely Take Over Users’ Systems Are Discovered

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By Peter Brosdahl

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Image: Activision

It looks as if Microsoft perhaps should’ve spent more time reviewing the older Call of Duty title prior to releasing it on Game Pass. Call of Duty: WWII was added to Game Pass last week on June 30 and has already been taken offline. Users began reporting strange occurrences not too long after its release on Microsoft’s subscription service. Players had their gaming sessions interrupted by text pop-ups informing them that their computers had just been hacked. Some also reportedly had pornography displayed onscreen, or their PCs were remotely shut down during gameplay.

Bad actors were said to be gaining access to users’ systems via RCE (remote code execution) exploits, which were still present in the game that had originally launched in 2017 for consoles and PC. While these exploits seem to only be affecting PC users on Game Pass, knowledge of their existence is not new, as some have stated they’ve been around for some time across multiple COD titles. Evidently, there are folks out there happy to provide the code necessary to take advantage of these exploits, for a price, thus allowing users to take control of other systems remotely.

The biggest threat with RCE exploits is that while they may not immediately allow full access to a system, they do allow a payload to be dropped, which can install an executable file that will. Although there’s been no official acknowledgement of the exploit, Activision has taken the game down as it investigates “reports of an issue”.

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Peter Brosdahl
As a child of the 70’s I was part of the many who became enthralled by the video arcade invasion of the 1980’s. Saving money from various odd jobs I purchased my first computer from a friend of my dad, a used Atari 400, around 1982. Eventually it would end up being a lifelong passion of upgrading and modifying equipment that, of course, led into a career in IT support.

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