Dark Souls servers for PC are down to investigate a severe security flaw

If you’re logging in on either Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, or Dark Souls 3 to get some PvP action, you’ll notice that servers are down at the moment, and for good reason as the series’ community has discovered a severe security risk on the PC version of each game. 

It’s a pretty disturbing exploit as when you connect to a player’s game, you are able to run any kind of code directly to your computer through the game’s online feature. In a tweet below, this exploit was demonstrated when a player ran a scripted code to play a voice text through a streamer’s computer for him and his viewers to hear and see. 

You thought DBD leaking IPs was bad?
Now we’ve seen Dark Souls streamers having scripts run through their PC that can play text-to-speech (and god knows what else).
Lovely stuff, huh. pic.twitter.com/SbBcBORJfi

— Otzdarva (@OtzdarvaYT) January 22, 2022

This is of course a very minor act but the fact that it was done successfully means that a more severe action can be done by other players from installing dangerous malware to bricking your system by simply passing on a batch of code to be executed through the Dark Souls multiplayer feature. 

Thanks to the quick response to the community for making this issue loud to various platforms such as Reddit, devs are now well aware and are now investigating the serious issue, which resulted in servers going down for the time being. 

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.

We apologize for this inconvenience.

— Dark Souls (@DarkSoulsGame) January 23, 2022

Quick action from both the community and the developers, and hopefully this gets resolved sooner rather than later. This is a great catch from the Dark Souls community as this could have affected the release of From Software’s latest game Elden Ring, which is said to use a similar network structure found in the Dark Souls games. 

To be clear – this current issue is only for the PC version of the game. Consoles are not affected by server downtime and the exploit. For now, PC players should stay offline to be safe.