A hacker banned Call of Duty players for a long time by sending them a simple message. This code mistakenly triggered the game’s anti-cheat system against the targeted person.
Activision, the popular publisher of Call of Duty, announced last month that it had fixed a bug in its anti-cheat system that would have impacted ” and small number of player accounts “. However, the American media TechCrunch revealed, on November 7, that several thousand people would be affected by this flaw.
Some hackers would have had fun turning cheat detection programs against simple players during ordinary games on Call of Duty Modern Warfare III et Call of Duty: Warzone. « I could have done this for years, and as long as I targeted random players and no one famous, it would have gone unnoticed said a hacker known as Vizor, adding that he found ” fun to take advantage of this bug ».
The worst part of this story is that the hacker was able to operate for a long time by simply sending a message to his victims.
Call of Duty cheat code sent to online players
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In 2021, Activision launched an anti-cheat system on Call of Duty called Ricochet, said to be difficult to circumvent due to its ability to quickly detect fraudulent codes. The program could ban a player from the moment he spotted these lines of code. One of the most famous was the “Trigger Bot” code, which allowed it to fire automatically as soon as the sight passed in front of the target.
However, Vizor discovered that it was enough to send a private message containing the term Trigger Bot, or other specific text strings used as signatures, for the targeted player to be wrongly identified as a cheater and then banned from the game. With other hackers, he wrote a script to send these messages in a loop, thereby randomly banning players without the need for manual intervention.
Once the code was written in the target’s memory, through their messaging, it was banned.
Over time, Vizor even began targeting well-known players, attracting community attention when some streamers reported unjustified bans.
A person who worked at Activision told TechCrunch that the Ricochet system scanned specific signatures, and that “itit could have been used against anti-cheat », evoking the method used by Vizor.
The company was reportedly alerted to the existence of this flaw when a developer nicknamed Zebleer published an analysis of the bug on X (formerly Twitter). The bug would therefore be corrected today, and you have lost a chance to ban this friend who shoots you in every game.
