A new report has caused a massive stir in the Call of Duty community. The rumor is that more than 500,000 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare accounts have been hacked, leading to a flurry of panic and rush to secure accounts with new passwords and such. Trouble is, Activision denies that it’s even taking place at all. So what’s the deal, is there a Call of Duty hack or not?
According to the publisher, in a statement posted on Twitter early this morning, they debunked the idea that more than 500,000 accounts had been compromised. Activision said that the claims are not accurate.” It’s hard to know who’s telling the truth here, but it seems like you might want to change your password, just to be safe.
It appears that the rumors started to swirl after a now-deleted Twitter account tried to spread the news of a mass hacking attack. The account, ‘oRemyy’, posted that “the biggest hack in Call of Duty history is happening right now,” later suggesting that “this is 10x worse than the notorious PS3 hack,” (via Techraptor) referring to a 2011 breach that led to accounts being hacked and used for cheating and other nefarious purposes.
And as often happens, content creators reacted without fact-checking, causing panic to spread from there. Let this be a lesson any content creators, Twitter personalities or just randos online, don’t believe everything you read. This is probably just a case of minor hacks, which happen literally all the time, being blown out of proportion.
Techraptor has since amended their story, saying that “Activision has told TechRaptor that the Activision account compromise is not happening,” while also adding that they have reports from users who “reached out to us saying otherwise.” Techraptor doesn’t elaborate on these claims, and it’s entirely possible that it could have been both a mix of trolling and actual accounts being hacked.
Here’s the statement provided to Techraptor:
Activision Call of Duty accounts have not been compromised. Reports suggesting otherwise are not accurate. We investigate all privacy concerns. As always we recommend that players take precaution to protect their accounts at all times. Please visit our player support page for further information, including a helpful set of tips and step-by-step instructions: https://support.activision.com/articles/keeping-your-activision-account-secure)
The Activision Support Twitter account released a message that stated plainly “reports suggesting Activision Call of Duty accounts have been compromised are not accurate.” Promising that “we investigate all privacy concerns,” and that any users concerned should change their details if they are concerned.
It’s hard to say if a breach happened at all. Although it would be quite the legal quagmire to try and deny a breach, given that many countries now require users to be notified of data breaches concerning their personal information. And if such a breach did happen, there would undoubtedly be a credentials leak published online or the dark web. That leak would eventually be picked up by sites like HaveIBeenPwned, a service that crawls the various hacked credentials posted online and allows you to check if your email is among them.
If you’re concerned, go register your email addresses for these services and potentially consider enabling two-factor authentication on any accounts that support it. That will possibly prevent some hacks. And it will at least give you a chance of a heads-up if you do get caught in a breach. Maybe consider using a password manager to generate strong unique passwords for any accounts.
