Activision pulls Call of Duty game after PC players are hacked

Dominic Preston is a news editor with over a decade’s experience in journalism. He previously worked at Android Police and Tech Advisor.

Activision has taken one of its Call of Duty games down from the Microsoft Store and PC version of Game Pass, reportedly because multiple PC players had their computers compromised by hackers after playing the title.

The publisher announced that 2017 shooter Call of Duty: WWII was “brought offline” on Friday, “while we investigate reports of an issue.” The outage only affects PC versions of the game from Microsoft’s storefront and the Game Pass subscription service, and the game remains playable through Steam on PC, along with Xbox and other platforms.

Activision didn’t announce a reason for taking the game offline, but social media is awash with reports of players having their PCs hacked after playing the game. Streamer Wrioh posted a clip of the hack in action, which shows the game freeze, command line and text box windows pop up, and the desktop wallpaper changed. The text box warns that Wrioh has been “RCEd,” referring to remote code execution vulnerabilities, in which a hacker plants malware that allows them to run malicious code and take control of a device.

Call of Duty: WWII was only added to Game Pass and the Microsoft Store in June, and therein may lie the issue. TechCrunch reports that different versions of the game were added to Microsoft’s store and subscription, including “an old flaw that had been patched on other versions of the game.” At the time of writing, the game has not yet been restored.