With 2.5 million monthly active players, GTA Online remains one of the most popular games on Steam and consoles. Unfortunately, this success comes at a price, and Sometimes GTA 5 multiplayer is targeted by hackers.
Exactly, if you’re playing GTA Online on PC, we recommend being very careful. As the Rockstar Games news-based Twitter account Tez2 reported, GTA Online harbors a particularly dangerous, critical vulnerability.
Rockstar is aware of this before the first mod menu starts abusing new exploits and logs all affected accounts.#GTAOnline
—Tez2 (@TezFunz2) January 21, 2023
This flaw in GTA Online threatens your account…
It allows an attacker to change/remove or increase the stats of a targeted player’s character after being exploited by hackers. But that’s not all, as hackers can block or block the user from accessing their own servers. Better, It’s even possible to hack an account to trigger a ban by the studio’s anti-cheat system.
Several users who were victims of this flaw came to the fore on social networks with supporting videos. User @Fluuffball posted an excerpt from a corrupt account. As we can see, the connection to the GTA Online servers is no longer established and the aerial camera of the city of Los Santos remains on the screen indefinitely.
This is what it looks like if your account is “broken” due to a recent RCE exploit on PC. Basically, you’ll be stuck in the clouds indefinitely trying to get online.
AVOID GTAO ON PC NOW#GTAOnline pic.twitter.com/1SqGmz38Jw
—floorball (@Fluuffball) January 21, 2023
And also your PC!
But beware, there is something more serious. According to Speyedr, the developer of Guardian (a dedicated firewall for GTA 5), this flaw would also allow remote code execution via GTA Online.. In other words, a hacker could be activating malware on machines running the game.
If Guardian can protect against this vulnerability, Instead, Speyedr urges users not to use GTA Online until Rockstar fixes the issue.. Indeed, the installation and especially the configuration of Guardian follows a complex procedure. The software is useless if it is not respected, especially by novice users.
As of now, Rockstar is aware of the issue and is currently working to fix it. By the way, it is better to avoid playing GTA Online, at least on PC. Tez2 shared a Band-Aid solution regarding corrupt accounts:
- Go to My Documents and delete the Rockstar Games folder
- Reload GTA Online to refresh account data
This is reminiscent of this flaw detected in the multiplayer code of Dark Souls games. This vulnerability also allowed remote code execution. Bandai Namco had to shut down the servers of the respective games for more than 6 months when it was time to find a solution. Shortly after, the publisher’s servers at Elden Ring were attacked by ransomware.
