FromSoftware on Sunday was forced to take down its online servers for Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring after a potentially dangerous exploit was discovered.
First reported by VGC, the exploit could allow a hacker to take over a gamers entire PC.
To prove the exploit worked, a hacker targeted Dark Souls 3 streamer  The__Grim__Sleeper during a live Twitch stream. The hack triggered the streamers Microsoft’s text-to-speech feature via PowerShell.
The Verge notes that the hacker allegedly attempted to contact FromSoftware directly but was ignored until they showcased the remote code execution (RCE) by targeting online streamers.
FromSoftware was quick to take down its servers and issued a notice on Twitter.
“This downtime does not affect PvP servers for Xbox or PlayStation consoles,” the team at FromSoftware also tweeted from the Dark Souls official Twitter page.
Finding the exploit now is great news for Elden Ring which is set to launch out of its beta next month. The game is getting a ton of positive early feedback and is likely to score big on launch day. Had the exploit not have been exposed by ethical hackers, it could have led to a mass infection on day one.
So far there have been no reports of the current exploit being used in nefarious ways. That’s a good outcome so far considering that Kaspersky lists RCE’s among the worst type of potential exploits.
