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Marvel's Avengers Has A Bug That Is 'Leaking Players' Personal Information'

Pixabay | Square Enix

Written by

Tom Chapman

Posted

23rd Jun 2021 10:20

We might need to assemble Earth's Mightiest Heroes, as Square Enix finds itself in hot water with a potential data breach. Since its release last year, Crystal Dynamics' Marvel's Avengers has ridden a divisive wave of critical panning and underwhelming updates. As the developer looks to the future, there's a new issue where players' personal information is apparently being leaked online.

This year's E3 showed off an impressive roadmap of content, which included a look ahead at the "War For Wakanda" expansion that will finally bring Black Panther to the fold. Plans for the King of Wakanda to be added were delayed by the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman.

Ahead of this, there's the Cosmic Cube event that came alongside the latest patch. Unfortunately, as well as adding a tonne of new content for wannabe Avengers to chug through, the update has added a problem where Marvel's Avengers players are having personal information leaked online.

How is Marvel's Avengers leaking personal information?

We're aware of the issue where a floating string of text appears on the screen and are investigating. Thank you for the reports!
— Marvel's Avengers (@PlayAvengers) June 22, 2021

According to Forbes, the latest update affects PlayStation 5 users and includes a string of floating text across your screen - which also features your IP address. The text displays your IP address, gamertag, date and time, as well other seemingly random numbers. Although Crystal Dynamics took to Twitter to confirm the issue, there was no mention of the seemingly devastating consequences of giving away your IP address.

In a follow-up Tweet, CD explained, "We are currently testing a solution to the issue of personal information, including the player’s IP address and username, being displayed on screen on PS5 and plan to deploy a hotfix tomorrow at around 8AM PT. PlayStation 5 players should refrain from streaming or posting screenshots online until then as sensitive information may be displayed".

What should players do next?

I don't play Marvel's Avengers. However this seems to be really poor QA testing. How can you release an update that EXPOSES YOUR IP ADDRESS on the screen. And the dev team on Twitter says it is just a "string of text" but to not stream until they fix it. "String of text" what? https://t.co/L4cjSCkunU
— TravisSch (@travisschgaming) June 22, 2021

While it doesn't look like we have another Cyberpunk 2077 debacle on our hands, this could be bad news for Square Enix. Last year, you might remember hackers got into CD Projekt Red HQ and reportedly stole the source code for some major titles. Worse than this, the company was then held to ransom amidst fears of sensitive information being leaked.

In the meantime, you're advised to put down your controllers until a patch can be issued. As pointed out, Marvel's Avengers doesn't exactly have a massive streaming community. Then again, there are sure to be plenty of players who planned on streaming the new content from the Cosmic Cube update.

Forbes described the above as a DEFCON 1 situation and advised Crystal Dynamics to shut down the servers. This might be a little extreme, but remember how someone having hold of your IP address can allow them to hack into your computer and potentially get hold of more sensitive information like your credit card details.

We can't see the Marvel's Avengers servers being shut down, but until an official fix is live, we'd suggest avoiding the troubled title for now. Hopefully, enough players see this before they start giving away their personal information by accident.