A recent update for the PC version of Street Fighter 5 game developer Capcom has introduced a hidden rootkit designed to prevent players from cheating in multiplayer sessions.

According to Capcom, the new rootkit was designed to allow the game to check for hacks and cheats that run while players play the game.

Instead of just allowing the game to check for hacking attempts the rootkit also introduced several security issues and backdoors on the player's system.

The rootkit makes use of a driver called capcom.sys that was installed with a Steam title update yesterday.

The driver makes players of the game vulnerable to malware due it temporarily disabling Intel's Supervisor Mode Execution Protection, or SMEP for short.

By having the rootkit disable SMEP during playtime players are vulnerable to attacks because the disabled protection scheme is used to prevent kernel level software from executing code in user-owned memory blocks.

In a recent statement a Capcom representative has commented on the matter stating that the company is "in the process of rolling back the security measures added to the PC version of Street Fighter V."

The recent update that undos the rootkit only disables the usage of the capcom.sys driver. Players still have to manually remove the file from their system32 windows folder.

The update also introduced the recently announced character Urien to the game. With the recent rollback update players will still be able to access the new content.