Call of Duty is a very popular first-person shooter franchise and most of us have been playing it for years. It's well known for its arcade shooting, good multiplayer, good zombies mode and many more fun elements.
Activision has released many Call of Duty games from Call of Duty 1 to Call of Duty Modern Warfare II. They released about 22 games including warzone, warzone 2.0 and Call of Duty Mobile. They go for a yearly release model and have released a lot of games since 2003.
However, since they release so many games, it becomes very hard to keep all of them updated and provide regular patches. Activision is notorious for abandoning the previous game once a new Call of Duty title comes out. They stop all sorts of content updates and focus only on the latest title. This means that you have to buy the latest game every year.
Since the older games don't get updated anymore, they become prone to security loopholes, vulnerabilities and RCE attacks. These vulnerabilities make the game very unsafe and pose a huge security risk.
What is RCE?
RCE stands for Remote Code Execution. It's a method through which a hacker can exploit the vulnerabilities of software and run malicious code on your pc.
This will give them access to exploit your pc, gather your personal information or even crash your PC.
How Serious And Widespread Is This?
Pre-COD WW2 games have a lot of exploits in them especially Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (2009) and Call of Duty Black Ops 2(2012). Hackers are widespread in both of these games and playing these games is a huge risk since they both have RCE exploits.
The hackers can not only run malicious code, but they can also make unauthorised changes to your system, change the wallpaper, access your data and even kick you out of the game and crash your pc.
Almost all of the games before COD WW2 suffer from some sort of vulnerability and Activision never bothered to fix them.
What Is Activision Doing About It?
Activision didn't do much about these vulnerabilities despite constant criticism from the Call of Duty community.
Recently, similar RCE exploits and a few other vulnerabilities were discovered in Call of Duty Black Ops III and Activision did try to fix it. They rolled out an update last month to fix the issues but unfortunately that wasn't effective and the hackers found even more vulnerabilities.
Despite all these challenges, the community came together and found a solution for these problems since Activision isn't doing much about it.
The Solution
Many people in the COD community came together and developed custom private clients which let players play on dedicated servers rather than using a peer-to-peer method which was found to be unsafe and slow.
These clients work as a modification to the games and claim to fix all the vulnerabilities that were discovered by the community.
They also unlock all the existing DLCs for free and even let players use mods.
Some of the popular clients are:
Plutonium for BO2, WaW, MW3, BO1
iw4x
iw6x
s1x
Momo's boiii
CoD4x
TechnoMW3
Black Ops III client(Momo's boiii) is still under development during the time of writing this article but it can be accessed by donating the creator some money on his Patreon.
Conclusion
Overall, playing older COD titles is very risky right now on PC because of the number of exploits in them but with the help of community-made clients, they can be played safely without worrying too much about the vulnerabilities.