Call of Duty owner Activision has been fairly open about its mitigation strategies to lessen the number of cheaters in the game using its Ricochet anti-cheat software, which a hacker reportedly says they used an exploit with to get legitimate players banned from the game.
Hacking in games has long been an issue for online titles like Call of Duty and other shooters. Each studio does things a little differently in an attempt to stop this kind of behavior. Activision’s method, the Ricochet software, deploys several mitigations that are designed to be punishment for cheaters in the process of a ban. Some of these mitigations have made players invisible to cheaters, while others take away a cheater’s parachute in Call of Duty: Warzone. Resulting in them falling to their deaths after jumping out of the plane. Another would insert hallucinations.
Destiny 2 developer Bungie employs different methods, though it’s unclear how it detects cheaters as Bungie won’t discuss its methods. Earlier this year, Activision said it had found a bug in the Ricochet software that resulted in a small number of legitimate players being banned. The company says it has since fixed that bug. That might not be the whole story though.
Hacker says they used an anti-cheat exploit to ban thousands of Call of Duty players
According to a recent report from TechCrunch, the bug that Activision fixed with its anti-cheat software wasn’t banning players all on its own. The bug was being exploited by a hacker who goes by the name of “Vizor” to get players banned by the thousands.
Vizor says this could have gone on for years without Activision noticing. Activision did notice, however. Because the exploit was eventually written about by a cheat developer named Zebleer. Zebleer posted about it on X. This led Activision to fix the bug, and players who received illegitimate bans were unbanned.
The exploit used “whisper” messages that contained specific code signatures
Based on the details from Vizor in the interview with TechCrunch, Ricochet was using coded strings of text that contained signatures (certain words associated with cheats) to identify cheaters. These “signatures” would be spotted by the anti-cheat software. Vizor says they found out what these signatures were, and would send whisper messages in-game to random players. Which resulted in a ban.
Ricochet would scan for certain messages, like “trigger bot,” and then ban players where this signature was detected. The issue it seems is that none of these signatures were protected. So it was possible for people like Vizor to find them and use them for their own ends. Which in this case was to troll other players. In the end, though, Vizor says that they “had their fun.” Noting that they were glad to see Activision unbanning players who didn’t deserve it.
