Black Ops III has been attacked by hackers for more than six months

Call of Duty: Black Ops III, the popular first-person shooter developed by Treyarch and published by Activision in 2015, is currently going through hard times. The game contains significant vulnerabilities that allow attackers to remotely control a licensed copy of the game of other gamers if they participate in the same online match.

With the help of a special hacker modification, ill-wishers can disconnect other players from the match, initiate a game crash to the desktop, violate the integrity of purchased DLC and even find out the real IP address of the players.

The situation is so serious that some streamers have urged people to boycott Black Ops III and not play it until Treyarch fixes all vulnerabilities. However, the policy of Activision, the publisher of the Call of Duty series, is aimed more at developing new parts and making money, rather than fixing errors and flaws in frankly old parts of the series.

Meanwhile, according to statistics from the gaming platform Steam, Black Ops III still plays up to 5,000 players daily. “The game is full of hackers. There are many security vulnerabilities that have a serious impact,” said Maurice Heumann, one of the gamers who is trying to fix the game on his own.

Heumann has been “reverse engineering” Black Ops III since 2015. At the time, he and a friend were working on a modified “client” for the game. However, as soon as the developers tweeted about their project, Activision immediately sent them a letter demanding they stop working on the modification, threatening to sue.

Now the developers are trying to do it again, and so far there have been no objections from Activision. Heumann personally told Activision in the middle of last year that he discovered two critical vulnerabilities in the game, which hackers use to remotely execute code. However, the company has not released a fix so far.

“Since Activision is doing nothing, I’m just going to fix it myself,” Maurice Heumann said publicly. It’s funny that after that, the staff responsible for the development of the game “stirred” and Neil Wood, a representative of Activision and Treyarch, commented on the situation: “Call of Duty: Black Ops III was released in 2015, and we intend to continue to support it even 8 years after initial release. We are aware of a technical issue with the Steam version of Call of Duty: Black Ops III and plan to release an update this week.”

However, while no official fix has been released, Heumann is still testing his modified version of the client. He has been developing it for the past 9 months, and about 180 volunteers help him in this. According to the author of the modification, in a couple of months you can wait for the release version of the client, which can be accessed by all interested players.

The disadvantage of the altruistic developer’s fix is ​​that players from the modified client and the official client will not be able to play together. This means that in the modified version of the server, they will actually be half empty, and the time for selecting players will increase significantly. However, Heumann does not give up and draws as much attention as possible to his project so that at a full-fledged release launch, there are enough players for a comfortable game.

It would be really ridiculous if Activision really will soon release a fix patch, thus canceling out 9 months of work for the developer and the whole team of testers. But even so, Heumann did enough to get a big, hard-nosed corporation like Activision to take some action to keep their product safe. Ultimately, casual gamers will still benefit from this “conflict of interest” and get a normal playable version of their favorite shooter.