Hackers are infecting players of an outdated Call of Duty game with a worm that spreads itself through internet chat rooms.
San Francisco, 28 July: Hackers are infecting online lobbies of an older Call of Duty game with a virus that spreads automatically.
According to TechCrunch, a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 player informed his fellow players on a Steam forum on June 26 that hackers “attack using hacked lobbies,” and he recommended that his other players protect themselves by using antivirus software.
It seems that the virus discussed in this post may be found in the VirusTotal database.
In the same forum topic, another user claimed to have studied the virus and stated it seems to be a worm based on a number of text strings inside the infection.
A gaming industry insider who requested anonymity because they were not authorised to talk with the press verified the existence of those strings in the virus, which signals a worm.
Activision, the publisher of the game in 2009, has a representative named Neil Wood who referred to a tweet issued by the company’s ‘Call of Duty Updates’ account on Thursday that made oblique reference to the virus.
We are currently looking into reports of a problem, which led us to temporarily disable multiplayer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) on Steam.
The motivations of the cybercriminals behind the dissemination of this virus remain unknown.
The malicious software acts like a worm since it spreads itself automatically from one infected player to another through online lobbies.
According to the study, “this indicates that the hackers have discovered and are exploiting one or more bugs in the game to execute malicious code on the other players’ computers.”
