Is CS2 safe to play?

Counter-Strike 2 has been a wild ride of endless patches for the new iteration of Valve’s popular Counter-Strike series. The new game is still changing with new updates being released regularly.

On the 14th of December Valve deployed another patch to the game.

In the release notes one line was particularly interesting.

- Fixed multiple exploits that allowed adding non-text data into UI labels

This exploit was detected after a Reddit post had highlighted that it was now possible to insert pictures when voting to kick a player. But what seemed to be an opportunity to post uncensored images of anything turned out to be much worse.

The YouTuber Sparkles highlighted the dangers surrounding the exploit in this video, where he warned everyone from playing the game.

In the video, Sparkles reveals a serious security exploit in Counter-Strike 2 (CS2). The exploit involves an XSS vulnerability that allows an attacker to capture players' IP addresses by manipulating in-game elements. The attacker can execute various malicious actions, including remote downloads.

Can you play CS2 now?

With the recent update to the game, it should be safe to play CS2 once again despite the lack of information from Valve. In the end, you will have to decide whether you trust Valve enough to start up the game, or if you want to wait it out. We here at Pley.gg have started to play the game again now.

We will strongly recommend you to have all the necessary protection such as Two Factor Authentication for Steam turned on while also having the correct firewall protection installed before playing.