Gamers are fixing a video game ‘taken over’ by hackers

techcrunch.com:

A popular first-person shooter game has significant vulnerabilities that allow malicious hackers to take over other players’ computers, as long as they are in the same online match. The situation is so dire that some streamers have urged people not to play the game, as they have declared it “completely unplayable” because hackers have “taken over.”

“I’ve been running into a lot of them, it’s been like almost every single lobby,” one streamer said in a video from six months ago.

The vulnerabilities are in Call of Duty: Black Ops III, a game published by Activision. According to another streamer “hackers have a tool that can reveal your IP address,” when playing the game.

“They can join your game, they can kick you from the game, they can corrupt your [Downloadable Content], they can crash your game, they can fucking do anything they want,” he added.

Released in 2015, Black Ops III still attracts more than 5,000 players a day, according to stats from the gaming platform Steam. Because of its age, patching the vulnerabilities does not appear to be a priority for the game’s publisher Activision, so two gamers-turned-hackers have taken it into their own hands to patch the game’s vulnerabilities and make it safer to play.

“The game has become infested with hackers. There are tons of security vulnerabilities which have a severe impact,” Maurice Heumann, one of the two hackers behind the effort to fix the game, told TechCrunch. “You can get hacked just by playing the game. Your data can be stolen and so much more.”

Heumann has been reverse engineering Black Ops III since 2015. At the time, he and a friend were working on a “client” — essentially a modified, customized version of the game — but because they were “young and dumb,” he