Half the 2023 COD Schedule Leaked in Activision Hack

Jakob Aylesbury / 2 years ago

Information surrounding the roadmap of future updates for the latest Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 has been leaked in a hacking incident at Activision. Following a tweet from user @vxunderground, Activision was breached back in December last year involving a successful Phishing attempt of a privileged user on the network. This allowed the infiltrators to leak documents showing content to be released as far ahead as November 2023.

.@Activision was breached December 4th, 2022. The Threat Actors successfully phished a privileged user on the network. They exfiltrated sensitive work place documents as well as scheduled to be released content dating to November 17th, 2023.

Activision did not tell anyone. pic.twitter.com/urD64iIlC5
— vx-underground (@vxunderground) February 20, 2023

Phishing Attempt

The phishing attempt involved the attackers sending a message pretending to be “Activision Automated SMS Dispatcher:” which allowed them to gain access to the user’s 2FA code and in turn access to their account. This happened back in December and I don’t recall Activision ever publically mentioning this incident which is likely due to the nature of the incident, hopefully, not involving customer information.

Not everyone fell for the Phishing attempt as one staff member simply told the attackers to “go f*** your self”. Recognising phishing is one thing telling them to do that is another.

What Was Leaked?

The leak itself doesn’t have much that is particularly interesting, it simply confirms release dates for the future seasonal updates to Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 as well as the new content being added. Nothing more than a couple of numbers for new maps, operators and weapons. Though there is one notable thing alongside the leaked seasonal information surrounding something codenamed “Jupiter”. In the leaked documents there are 3 items named, JupiterGL4, JupiterAlpha and Jupiter GL5 these are all lined up for April, May and June respectively. Jupiter, I suspect may be the codename for the next Call of Duty game especially seeing as June was the release date of the reveal for MW2 so the timeline matches up. However, this would be odd as Modern Warfare 2 is expected to have a 2-year cycle with no Call of Duty title set to release in 2023.