Dark Souls 1, 2 & 3 PVP Online Servers Down to Protect Players
At the moment, the Dark Souls 3 Servers, particularly for the PVP option, are offline. According to Bandai Namco, and From Software, this is due to the need to protect players of Dark Souls 1,2, and 3 on PC from being attacked by a particular vulnerability that has come to light.
This was Tweeted about this morning by the Offical Dark Souls account today: “PvP servers for Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls: Remastered have been temporarily deactivated to allow the team to investigate recent reports of an issue with online services. Servers for Dark Souls: PtDE will join them shortly.”
There has not been a report of how long the Servers will be down, nor of how long it will take to fix this vulnerability to remote code execution (RCE) exploit. However, playing any of the Dark Souls games offline is currently unaffected.
According to some, however, this vulnerability, which would allow a malicious hacker to overtake another person’s PC, has been there for quite some time. According to some reports, there was a person who was aware of the vulnerability and tried to let both Bandai and From Software be aware of the possible way users could be attacked. Seemingly, this was ignored. It was only when it was demonstrated and exploited on a live Twitch stream for The__Grim__Sleeper, having his game crash and text to speech start talking that it became wide public knowledge. From appearances, the Twitch User was shocked and had not willingly participated in this demonstration.
This is not the first time that Dark Souls online games have had problems. However, it is difficult to say how many people are aware of how to pull off the nasty hack, as there may be as little as four people who are able to pull off the nasty little hack as of current.
However, those four, more or less, can cause a lot of problems for future players. It’s best to take care of the problem now, rather than let it become a bigger one in the future.