Embark Studios fixed a huge security breach, so at least the studio isn’t collecting Discord messages.

The latest update to Arc Raiders is not a typical patch or new content expansion. The team rushed it out yesterday morning after technology blogger and systems engineer Timothy Meadows pointed out an incident in which two Arc Raiders players’ private Discord direct messages appeared in a game log file. According to Meadows, the game’s Discord software development kit (SDK) recorded private messages between the two users and a Discord Bearer token. This was a significant overreach in terms of the data collected by Embark through the Arc Raiders Discord SDK. Fortunately, this issue has been resolved as of this morning’s update.

“The team is also working on a hotfix to address an issue where the Discord SDK logged excessive user information. Rest assured that your private and/or personal data was not sent outside your machine, and Embark has not reviewed or kept such information. We will disable the Discord SDK logging and conduct a deeper audit to ensure there are no further issues,” Embark wrote in a message to players on the Arc Raiders Discord server.

Meadows said the problem stemmed from the way the game’s Discord SDK works. When Discord integration with Arc Raiders is enabled, Embark uses full Discord Bearer authentication to access data. As Meadows explained, instead of filtering out sensitive events, the SDK logs everything it receives to disk. This is how private messages ended up as plain text in the game’s log files.

Fortunately, Embark Studios did not hesitate to correct the error and resolve the issue, and it is highly unlikely that they did so with malicious intent. However, this serves as a reminder of how careful we need to be about our online security and how much data the platforms we use collect.

Source: WCCFTech, Timothy Meadows