The servers for "Dark Souls Remastered", 2, and 3 were temporarily shut down due to an "issue with online services," according to Bandai Namco and From Software. While the publisher didn't provide any additional information, it's believed the "issue" is a recently publicized PC exploit that would allow a malicious hacker to invade your game and then remotely run code on your PC, effectively taking control of it.
"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," the official "Dark Souls" Twitter account tweeted. "Servers for Dark Souls: PtDE will join them shortly."
This downtime, as well as the vulnerability, do not affect any "Dark Souls" games on consoles.
The vulnerability was shown during The Grim Sleeper's "Dark Souls 3" Twitch stream. At the end of the stream (1:20:22), The Grim Sleeper's game crashes, and a robotic voice from Microsoft's text-to-speech synthesizer begins criticizing his gaming. The Grim Sleeper then states that Microsoft PowerShell opened on its own, indicating that a hacker used the application to run a script that activated the text-to-speech capability.
However, it's unlikely that this was a hostile hacker; a screenshot from the SpeedSouls' Discord channel may expose the "hacker's" true motives. According to the post, the "hacker" was aware of the flaw and attempted to inform From Software, the developer of "Dark Souls." He was apparently ignored, so he began pranking streamers to attract attention to the issue.
However, if a bad actor had discovered the flaw first, the consequences may have been even worse. According to Kaspersky, RCE is one of the most deadly vulnerabilities. It enables hackers to install harmful programs on their victim's computer, causing irreversible damage and perhaps stealing important data.
Blue Sentinel, a Dark Souls 3 anti-cheat mod created by the community, has since been patched to guard against the RCE vulnerability. A user explains in a post on the r/darksouls3 subreddit that only four people know how to carry out the RCE hack - two of them are Blue Sentinel developers, and the other two are persons "who worked on it," possibly alluding to the folks who helped find the bug.
This is not the first time that problems like this have arisen in "Dark Souls 3" multiplayer. In 2016, PC Gamer reported on intruders leaving hacked items in users' games, damaging their saves.
Again, the outage only affects PC players; you may still play online if you're using a PlayStation or Xbox. There's no news on when the servers will be operational again.
