iscover
Share this article on:
Powered by
MOMENTUM
MEDIA
Fans of the popular Call of Duty franchise have become targets of hackers spreading a worm via the game’s lobby.
Steam users started sharing details of the infection on the platform’s forums, with one user warning players of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – released in 2009 – to make sure to run a virus scanner on their systems.
“Make sure you have a virus scanner before using this game, they attack using hacked lobbies,” a fan called Bee said on 26 June.
“Replacing dsound.dll,” he added.
Another forum user later posted that they had analysed the suspicious payload and found evidence that the malware was, in fact, a self-spreading worm.
“I can see strings,” said lp.edoardo on 8 July, before listing some of his findings.
“Worm deactivated by control server” is one of the strings, and “Worm failed to retrieve data from the control server” is another. Other strings appear to track the percentage of infection, and one made reference to spreading in “modded lobbies”.
A game lobby is where players gather before joining a multiplayer match.
Now, the game has been taken entirely offline while the developer looks into the issue.
“Multiplayer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) on Steam was brought offline while we investigate reports of an issue,” said one of the game’s official accounts on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Being an older game, only a few hundred players are still active in the community, making it an odd target for spreading a worm.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
Be the first to hear the latest developments in the cyber industry.
