Wacatac.B!ml has caused the servers of the 2009 Call of Duty game to be temporarily taken offline.

First of all, it is commendable that Activision Blizzard keeps the servers of a fourteen-year-old game alive. But on the other hand, they had to suspend them for an unusual reason: veteran players of the old game (because it’s not the younger generation that is interested in it, they prefer to jump on the new titles the first chance they get, following the fad…) ran into hacked lobbies. The lobbies don’t cause superficially weird things (deleted settings or something annoying), but a self-spreading worm gets onto players’ PCs.

On Wednesday, it popped up on the Call of Duty Updates Twitter account (even if Elon Musk renames it X, it’s still Twitter!) that they took down the servers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 due to an issue, and yes, they didn’t specify the reason… but you can link the servers being taken down to players complaining about Wacatac.B!ml after being in the lobbies. On Steam, a user shared with the public that he had investigated the worm, and the results are a bit scary.

He says the worm was coded specifically for this game, which works so that anyone in the lobby has a chance of becoming a spreader, so anyone could be involved in spreading the computer malware. An unidentified source told TechCrunch that the malware does indeed have lines of code that make it a worm. So anyone who wants to play the old Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 online can’t do so now because until Activision Blizzard fixes the vulnerability on its servers, there is a chance of the worm spreading. If they do get a patch, players might have to wait for months, and there has been a case of that before, with Dark Souls taking a ‘forced rest’ for so long…

One thing we don’t understand. Why was it necessary to carry out such an attack on this game? Why didn’t the creator of the code target something more modern?

Source: PCGamer