Legacy Call of Duty fans were thrilled to jump back into the golden era of multiplayer with the recent release of the PlayStation port of Call of Duty: Black Ops 1. However, that initial wave of nostalgia has quickly turned into a nightmare for early adopters. Despite running on modern hardware, the newly released port appears to have inherited the severe security vulnerabilities of its 2010 predecessor, and allegedly bad actors are already exploiting them to ruin the experience.
Bricked profiles
The alarm was sounded on the r/BlackOps1 subreddit by a user named Jojdii, who shared a devastating warning to the community in a post titled, “Already got hacked, unfortunately.“
According to Jojdii, they booted up the new PlayStation port and hopped into a standard public matchmaking queue, only to accidentally land in a modded lobby. While modded lobbies in classic Call of Duty titles were historically known for ridiculous physics with glitched k9 units, or instant unlock commands, this encounter was purely malicious.
After securing just a single elimination, the modded lobby instantly wiped Jojdii’s multiplayer stats, breaking the profile by giving them an impossible, glitched kill score of -1e5.9. Worse still, this massive regression triggered a game-breaking loop within the client. Because the account’s progress was pushed deep into a negative value, the game recognizes the profile as technically being below Level 1. Since reaching Level 1 is the mandatory baseline required to unlock the ability to play online matches, the client has completely locked Jojdii out of the multiplayer menu entirely, rendering them unable to even select or search for an online game anymore.
While this remains an isolated report on paper, several other users under the Reddit thread have already chimed in to note that they are dealing with the exact same game-breaking flaw. It is currently unclear whether this exploit is rampant across public matchmaking or limited to a few bad actors. However, if left unpatched, this vulnerability could spell devastating consequences for the longevity of the Black Ops 1 port, and it raises massive red flags for the integrity of a potential Black Ops 2 exploit to be discovered in the future.
Peer to peer servers
The rapid compromise of the Black Ops 1 port points to a systemic issue with how legacy titles are brought to modern platforms. When classic games are ported, developers frequently preserve the original source code and netcode to maintain the authentic feel of the gameplay.
Unfortunately, this also means preserving ancient security flaws. Because Black Ops 1 relies heavily on peer-to-peer (P2P) networking rather than secure, dedicated modern servers, the host of a lobby wields immense control over the data being sent to other players. Malicious hosts can exploit this connection to force-inject corrupted data into a lobby.