Embark Studios has promptly rolled out an urgent update for its cooperative shooter, ARC Raiders, addressing a critical privacy flaw. The issue involved the game inadvertently logging users’ private Discord messages into its local log files.
The problem was brought to light by tech blogger and system engineer Timothy Meadows. His report detailed that the Discord SDK integrated into ARC Raiders was recording an excessive amount of data, including private messages exchanged between users and even Discord authentication tokens. This sensitive information was then stored in plain text within the game’s log files on the user’s computer.
According to Meadows, the root cause lay in the implementation of the Discord integration. When activated, the game utilized a full authentication token to access account data. However, the SDK failed to filter this content, writing almost all received information directly to disk, which led to private conversations appearing in the logs.
Embark Studios responded swiftly to the discovery. They quickly deployed a hotfix to resolve the issue. In an official message to players on their Discord server, the development team explained the situation:
“The team is also working on a hotfix to address an issue where the Discord SDK was logging an excessive amount of user information. Rest assured: your personal data was not sent outside of your computer, and Embark has not viewed or stored such information. We are disabling Discord SDK logging and conducting a deeper audit to ensure that similar problems do not occur again.”
— Embark Studios