Some reports indicate this happened to multiple streamers. In their conversation with Fanbyte, nrssr confirms their goal was to gain FromSoftware’s attention. Many believed it was an attempt to raise awareness for a serious threat rather than a malicious attack. The incident led to several days of headlines and prompted the Dark Souls community to speculate about its motivations. A clipped video shows the streamer’s Dark Souls 3 window crashing before the Microsoft text-to-speech voice begins reading a copypasta. Their plan consisted of a public demonstration of the exploit on an unsuspecting Twitch streamer known as The_Grim_Sleeper. “I wanted to make sure the community had some form of protection ASAP.” “Given FromSoftware’s track record about fixing exploits in their online games, I was not expecting them to act quickly,” nrssr explains. This led nrssr to write their own community patch and carry out a plan to grab public attention, hoping to alert FromSoftware. Although Bandai Namco’s support correspondence indicates it passed on the documentation to security teams working on Dark Souls, FromSoftware did not take action to address the vulnerability. In an email to Bandai Namco, they provided documentation on the vulnerabilities and fixes in addition to video demonstrations of how the RCE functions.

The Dark Souls 3 RCE vulnerability that’s currently in the spotlight is one that nrssr, who uses the moniker for privacy, says they reported back in early December 2021. The existence of serious vulnerabilities may extend across the Souls franchise, causing concern among players anticipating Elden Ring’s February launch. Past attempts to relay exploits to developer FromSoftware and communicate with Bandai Namco - including the disclosure of another RCE vulnerability back in 2020 - were said to be difficult and met with little to no action. Speaking to Fanbyte, LukeYui, the creator behind the popular Dark Souls security mod Blue Sentinel, and nrssr, who has been credited with discovering and demonstrating the recent vulnerability, say they have contacted Bandai Namco to report separate Dark Souls 3 vulnerabilities on multiple occasions. Since going offline, Bandai Namco has offered no further updates on its investigation, leaving players confused about the state of online modes and an unclear picture of what prompted the downtime. The day after, publisher Bandai Namco took down PVP servers for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3, and Dark Souls Remastered. On January 22, reports alleging that a Dark Souls 3 vulnerability was exposing PC players to remote code execution (RCE) threats - a security vulnerability allowing cyber attackers to run any command on a target’s PC - began to surface.

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