Grand Theft Auto Online's entire PC community is being discouraged from logging in to the game right now after reports of a dangerous exploit emerged over the weekend.
The said loophole can cause anything from minor annoyances like losing in-game progress and currency to corrupted accounts and, in some cases, degrading PC performance. Not long after the exploit became public knowledge, Rockstar Games has issued a statement.
Here's what Rockstar said about the ongoing issue:
We are aware of potential new exploits in GTA Online for PC, which we aim to resolve in an upcoming planned security-related Title Update.
If you think you might have experienced any related issues, please reach out to Rockstar Support.
The "remote code execution" exploit spares no one. This means that you're vulnerable to it as long as you're playing GTA Online on PC. The cheat was distributed through the North Online GTA cheat mod, which has since removed the abusive feature and apologized, saying it was "bad judgment on my part for adding this public."
It isn't clear if Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive will take legal action against the cheat maker, but it isn't impossible. Courts ordered the infinite-money hack maker to pay more than $150,000 in 2019.
The GTA Online community is trying out workarounds for players with corrupted accounts, but none have been proven to work 100% of the time. Because of this, it's recommended to avoid playing GTA Online until Rockstar patches things up.
The Guardian anti-cheat software maker, Speyedr, even advised against playing GTA Online on PC and has gone as far as to remove Guardian from GitHub.
It's worth noting that Bandai Namco and FromSoftware dealt with a similar vulnerability. It eventually forced them to shut down the Dark Souls series' multiplayer servers for roughly six months. We hope Rockstar doesn't have to resort to such measures with GTA Online.
