For a few days, a report is circulating on social networks, reporting that a new exploit has been discovered in the code of Dark Souls 3. It would allow the hacker to remotely execute code on another player’s PC, which would perform the various actions performed by the viruses these days, i.e. stealing usernames, passwords and banking information, installing a bitcoin miner, triggering spam on Discord with a link to the virus in order to contaminate other machines, and d other such fun. This is not the first time that a vulnerability of its kind has been discovered in the multiplayer mode of Dark Souls, to the point that the very aptly named blue sentinel mod (referring to the faction invoked to defend players in PvP) was created specifically by fans to protect our machines against such exploits. The team in charge of the mod would have been quickly informed of this new exploit in order to be able to take measures and update it.
The player who discovered this new exploit would have traced it to From Software, and the spread of the news on social networks obviously ended up reaching the right people since the studio and Bandai Namco have decided to shut down the multiplayer servers for all Dark Souls games on Steam PC as a precaution in order to investigate and fix the flaw if confirmed.
In practice, you don’t need to uninstall the games as some call it. You just have to play in offline mode, which is unavoidable at the moment with the shutdown of the servers. We confirm in passing that this only affects PC versions of Dark Souls games. Console versions, as well as Sekiro, Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls are unaffected.
It’s hard to say if the timing is good or bad, but it’s highly likely that their next game, Elden Ring, will suffer from the same vulnerability in multiplayer, since its online architecture seems very similar to previous games. Better to find it now and fix it before release. It is unlikely that this will cause an additional delay for its release, but it is still a small possibility.
The FromSoftware studio has developed many games and licenses, but not all of them are well known to the public nowadays, such as Shadow Tower Abyss or Armored Core and some duds. We take a look back at their main games, and how they were precursors to their modern titles.
There’s just over a month to go until From Software’s open world release, and the studio continues to reveal snippets of the game to keep us guessing. It’s nothing crazy, but if you’re looking for any info on the game, it’s here.