Hacker Bans Thousands of Call of Duty Players' Accounts
With the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 , Activision has beefed up its security measures to deal with cheaters in the game. The company announced a few weeks ago that it would be using AI to find and ban players who tried to bypass security and cheat. Oddly enough, one hacker was able to take advantage of this to ban thousands of players.
According to TechCrunch, a hacker known as Vizor discovered a vulnerability that allowed non-cheating players to be banned from their accounts. The issue was linked to Ricochet, the anti-cheat system used by Call of Duty and Warzone. While Activision has identified the flaw and restored the affected accounts, the impact will be greater than the company reported.
According to a tweet posted in mid-October, the situation only affected “a small number of legitimate players.” However, the hacker who exploited the vulnerability claims to have banned “thousands and thousands” of users after labeling them as cheaters. Vizor added that he discovered the exploit months ago and was able to silently ban players.
“I could have done this for years, and as long as I targeted random players and not anyone famous, no one would have noticed,” the hacker said. Vizor said it was fun to take advantage of this exploit that affected players’ accounts.
The Ricochet bug is powered by encrypted text strings used to identify cheaters. Vizor realized that he could send these strings via private messages to other players. By simply whispering the phrase “Trigger Bot” to the victim, Ricochet would respond by applying a ban to the affected account.
Apparently, the issue has already been resolved. Activision confirmed a few weeks ago that it had restored all affected accounts and promised to monitor its anti-cheat system.