CoD ban exploit might actually be much worse than Activision says
ActivisionA nefarious new Call of Duty exploit that lets cheaters ban anyone for no reason could be a lot worse than Activision says.
In October, ahead of Black Ops 6’s launch, content creator BobbyPoff was permanently banned despite never cheating.
As it turns out, and as confirmed by the developers, this was because of a RICOCHET anti-cheat exploit that allows cheaters to falsely permaban players without them even being in the same lobby.
Although Activision claimed only a “small number” of accounts were affected, an anti-cheat watchdog is sounding the alarm that this situation is worse than the developer is letting on.
“In the past week, 2 separate exploits within RICOCHET and BattlEye have been published,” wrote Anti-cheat PD. “Both exploits let abusers ban any player they wish permanently, the exploits may work for any game using the respective Anti-Cheats.”
BattlEye is used for games such as PUBG and GTA Online and according to zebleer, a lot more users were affected than the “small number” Activision said. A number of GTA players even quit for a while as bans were handed out.
Zebleer revealed a write-up from the founder of the exploit who explained: “For quite some time it has been possible to get people permanently banned by sending them a friend request or posting a message (“Nice Trigger Bot dude!”) in game chat.”
“I am in a position where I can say that several thousand random COD players were banned by this exploit before the streamers began to be targeted,” they added.
X/zebleerpo“Activision has already started to unban accounts that were banned using this exploit, but this comes with a caveat: also real cheaters who were caught by these signatures will get unbanned. Also Ricochet seems to not understand how many people got pwned by this with their small number claims.”
On October 18, Activision posted a blog detailing some RICOCHET upgrades coming with Black Ops 6, explaining that their goal is to catch and remove cheaters within one hour of their first match and are ramping up detections.
As the war against cheaters rages on, we’ll have to see if the damage from this exploit has serious ramifications once Black Ops 6 launches.