EA’s Origin Contains Bug Allowing Hackers To Hijack Your PC

EA hasn’t been having the greatest past couple of weeks as the recent SimCity fiasco has lead to gamers everywhere realizing just how much they despise the publisher and just yesterday, EA CEO John Riccitiello resigned from the company for reasons yet to be made public. Now, it looks like there may be a huge security flaw in its Origin platform.

At a Black Hat security conference in Amsterdam last week, researchers at ReVuln were able to demonstrate a bug in EA’s Origin platform that could potentially allow hackers to take control of a PC remotely. An accompanying paper, entitled “EA Origin Insecurity: When Local Bugs Go Remote.. Again,” explains the exploit.

“The Origin platform allows malicious users to exploit local vulnerabilities or features by abusing the Origin URI handling mechanism,” the paper states. “In other words, an attacker can craft a malicious Internet link to execute malicious code remotely on a victim’s system, which has Origin installed.”

EA has responded to this supposed security flaw by saying, “Our team is constantly investigating hypotheticals like this one as we continually update our security infrastructure.” Hopefully this flaw is purely a hypothetical one as it could certainly be disastrous for EA’s Origin platform.