ARC hackers hacked into private Discord DM messages from players
Well, this not something I expected to write about today: recently, an issue was discovered in 2025’s juggernaut shooter ARC Raiders that resulted in the game silently recording private DM messages between Discord users.
The issue in question first surfaced when computer engineer Timothy D. Meadows reported its existence in a blog post, explaining how ARC Raiders infiltrated players’ DMs in detail. “During gameplay of ARC Raiders, private Discord Direct Message (DM) conversations between two users were found to be recorded in clear text in a local game log file,” he wrote.
The discovery of this strange — and concerning, for obvious reasons — message recording prompted an Embark Studios developer to quickly announce a hotfix for the issue Thursday morning, noting that the Discord SDK had logged “excessive user data.” It also assures players that their data has not been leaked from their local system, and that a “deep investigation” is underway.
“The team is also working on a hotfix to address an issue where the Discord SDK logged a lot of user information. Make sure your private and/or personal data has not been sent outside of your device and Embark has not (and will not) update or store such information,” the developers wrote on the ARC Raiders Discord. “We will be disabling Discord SDK logging and conducting extensive testing to ensure there are no other issues. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our support team.”
While it’s good news that Embark is fixing this problem quickly, it’s shocking that such a massive privacy breach happened in the first place. Worse yet, users didn’t even know their messages were being leaked until now, as the problem was only recently discovered.
If you have your ARC Raiders account linked to your Discord or was previously linked, I strongly recommend that you check your system for your DMs log and delete it. Meadows says it will be available at C:UsersAppDataLocalPioneerGameSavedLogs folderso be sure to check there.
It is worth noting that Discord itself is facing some controversies about user privacy and data at the moment, with the application recently announcing plans to assume that everyone is young by default and require age verification to access all features. The backlash against this policy — and facial age estimation and government ID verification systems in particular — was so strong that Discord delayed until later this year, and completely overhauled its approach.
Seriously, check that log file!
Now, I’m not saying that there was any malicious intent here, or that Embark Studios was intentionally trashing your Discord DMs. But anyway, you should look and delete that log ASAP if you have your ARC Raiders and Discord accounts connected. I’d like to hear from you, though: has this made you rethink linking your Discord to the games you play? Let me know in the comments.
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