You might not want to play a Dark Souls game online for a bit after you hear this. It looks like attackers have discovered a security exploit in Dark Souls 3 (and maybe Elden Ring) for Windows that lets attackers remotely take control and hijack your PC. Streamers like The_Grim_Sleeper learned about the potential damage first-hand, where the intruder launched Microsoft PowerShell and ran a text-to-speech script blasting him for his gameplay. That would be very shocking.
However, it looks like the exploiter might not have bad intent though. A post on the SpeedSouls Discord says that the hacker was trying to warn developer FromSoftware about the Dark Souls 3 vulnerability, but turned to messing with some streamers in order to highlight the problem. Thankfully, few people beyond the perpetrator are aware of how to use this, but luckily there’s already a patch for the unofficial Blue Sentinel anti-cheat tool.
FromSoftware and its publisher Bandai Namco have now responded to the exploit. They have temporarily shut down the player-versus-player servers for Dark Souls 3 and its predecessors while the security team investigates these problems. We don’t know when the servers will go back online, but From and Bandai won’t restore service until they’re pretty confident that players are safe.
Source Engadget