Mass player bans
A hacker known as Vizor claims to have exploited a bug in Activision’s anti-cheat software, Ricochet, to ban thousands of legitimate Call of Duty players.
Activision announced in October that the bug, which led to some players being mistakenly flagged as cheaters, had impacted only “a small number” of users and was fixed.
But Vizor, who recently spoke to TechCrunch, claims the impact was far greater, suggesting that they had effectively weaponised the exploit to target unsuspecting players, framing them as cheaters.
“I could have done this for years and as long as I target random players and no one famous it would have gone without notice,” said Vizor, who described the exploit as “funny to abuse.”
The hacker explained that they had found a way to manipulate Ricochet’s anti-cheat mechanism by sending private “whisper” messages within the game, containing specific keywords associated with cheating.
These keywords, or “signatures,” were hardcoded into Ricochet’s system to detect malicious behaviour. When a player received a message containing these strings, such as “Trigger Bot”—a reference to a common cheat that automatically fires a weapon when aimed at an opponent—Ricochet flagged and banned the player receiving the message.
Vizor discovered this vulnerability in Ricochet’s methodology, which involves scanning players’ devices for strings of text to identify cheats.
However, the hacker noted that the software’s approach was inherently flawed: “I realized that Ricochet anti-cheat was likely scanning players’ devices for strings to determine who was a cheater or not. This is 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,” Vizor explained.
The Ricochet system, launched in 2021, was designed to combat the rampant cheating issues in Call of Duty by running at a kernel level, which grants it deeper access to system memory. It marked an aggressive step by Activision in its ongoing battle against cheaters in online gaming, where cheating services have evolved into a lucrative industry.
Developers like Zebleer, who create these cheats, often profit significantly by selling their software to players looking for an edge.
