Activision takes Call of Duty: WWII offline after hackers apparently disrupted the game with RCE exploits — malicious code wreaks havoc on PC gamers as bad actors take complete control of your computer

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023 promised to usher in a new era of harmony between PC and console. As such, Activision's marquee title, Call of Duty, has been slowly making its way over to Xbox and PC Game Pass. Now backed by an unfaltering tech giant, Call of Duty has maintained the servers for their older live-service games despite the franchise's annual release cadence. One of these games is Call of Duty: WWII, released in 2017 and still going strong in 2025... up until it was hacked to oblivion over the weekend.

COD: WW2 landed on Game Pass a few days ago, enabling millions to try the game for the first time, and while everything was going smooth over on the console side, mayhem ensued across the PC sector. According to various reports online, hackers have apparently taken over the game with the help of RCE exploits, leading to some relentless trolling.

For context, RCE stands for remote code execution and is a way of running malicious code on a computer without actually needing to be there in person. The bad actor gets access to your computer through loopholes in the security system, then injects a payload containing said malicious code that can wreak havoc on your computer. So far, there have been no reports of any serious harm done to COD: WWII players, but this is a dangerous tactic, nonetheless.

It's important to note that such exploits can only really work on PC since consoles do not provide the level of code execution freedom a conventional computer does, in order to pursue these shenanigans. Obviously, consoles do get hacked, but this particular issue is exclusive to PC and, unfortunately, has been a common occurrence with older COD titles for a long time.

Activision introduced its "Ricochet" anti-cheat system in 2019—with COD: Modern Warfare—to combat things like this. Since then, the publisher has iterated on the tech with Ricochet 2, making its anti-cheat harder and harder to crack. Therefore, without the level of protection needed against malicious operators, COD: WWII, which came out two years prior to Ricochet's introduction, is apparently fair game for hacking.

Moreover, COD: WWII still relies on P2P matchmaking, an archaic way of connecting two players (and their computers) together in order to enable multiplayer. This method has been succeeded with a dedicated server model in which all players connect to the server, which receives their input and sends it back and forth in real-time. As you could probably guess, directly connecting two players to each other leaves a lot of vulnerability on the table, which hackers exploited in the case of COD: WWII.

In response to this, Activision has since taken the game offline from the Microsoft Store, for some reason, despite the game still being available on Steam and PC Game Pass. It doesn't matter where you get the game from, the entirety of the PC platform is affected by this, so please avoid playing Call of Duty: WWII until this matter is resolved.

The damage, however, has already been done with several users being hacked over the weekend. In one video uploaded to X, a streamer got hacked while they were live and their desktop wallpaper was quickly changed to show an Activision lawyer. More interestingly, though, @LasagneManne revealed what looks like the exact tool these hackers are using to pull off their exploits. It includes standard options like kicking players off the server or enabling things like "God Mode," alongside the RCE button. Let's hope Activision has a patch ready to address this unfettered access soon enough.