'I had my fun' says hacker who used Call of Duty anti-cheat exploit to ban 'thousands upon thousands' of innocent players

Hardware’I had my fun' says hacker who used Call of Duty anti-cheat exploit to ban ‘thousands upon thousands’ of innocent playersWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)

A promotional screenshot from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. In a multiplayer mode, a skeletal player character with purple glowing eyes is flanked by two other armed operatives.

Last month,Activision postedthat they’d “identified and disabled a workaround” within their automated anti-cheat tool, Ricochet. The language of the post is purposefully vague about what actually happened, but the studio asserts that only a “small number” of legitimate Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare III players were affected, and that those accounts have since been reinstated.

Aimbots have been the bane of many a shooter fan’s existence—and indeedeven threw Apex Legends' anti-cheat software for a loop—so you can understand why Ricochet would have cheats like this in its sights. What is a lot less straightforward to understand is how simply typing the words ‘aim bot’ and sending them to another player could get them banned.

Vizor elaborates, “I realized that Ricochet anti-cheat was likely scanning players’ devices for strings to determine who was a cheater or not. This is fairly normal to do but scanning this much memory space with just an ASCII string and banning off of that is extremely prone to false positives.”

To put it in simplified terms, Ricochet was picking through player’s setups, looking for anything from a list of keywords—or signatures—and then banning when it found them, regardless of the context in which those keywords appeared. That’s not the wildest part.

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What’s wilder is that Vizor wrote a script that then automated the exploit process, allowing them to “join a game, post a message, leave the game, join a new game, repeat repeat repeat,” and keep dishing out permabans even while they were away on holiday. As Activision continued to update the anti-cheat software with new string signatures to look out for, Vizor kept up to date too, and continued, in their own words, “trolling” both the developer and Call of Duty players alike. This continued right up until fellow hacker Zeebler made the exploit much more widely known.

So now that Activision has finally worked out this workaround, how does Vizor feel with their “trolling” days at an end? Their takeaway may surprise you: “It was nice to see it get fixed and see unbans,” they admit before adding, “I had my fun.”

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