GamesFPSCall of DutyCall of Duty hacker says “I had my fun” after reportedly getting thousands of Warzone and Modern Warfare 3 players falsely bannedWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesFPSCall of DutyCall of Duty hacker says “I had my fun” after reportedly getting thousands of Warzone and Modern Warfare 3 players falsely bannedWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Activision)
A hacker says they’ve got “thousands upon thousands” of innocent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 andWarzoneplayers banned using an exploit in the game’sRicochet anti-cheat systemthat’s since been resolved.
“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 said it was “funny to abuse the exploit.”
For example, Vizor said one of these signatures was “trigger bot,” which is a cheat that automatically triggers a cheater’s gun to fire when its crosshair goes over a target. Ricochet was scanning players' computers for that string of text, and so when Vizor would private message a player using that specific language, it would trigger an automatic ban.
“I realized that Ricochet anti-cheat was likely scanning players' devices for strings to determine who was a cheater or not,” Vizor said. “This is fairly 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,” said Vizor.
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To maximize banning efficiency, Vizor said they developed a script that would program them to automatically join games, post messages with these trigger words, leave the game, and then rinse and repeat.Activisionwould occasionally add new signatures to Ricochet, and Vizor would dig through the code to find those and use them to continue getting players banned.
“I was most active with the trolling when [the] Ricochet anti-cheat team would add new string signatures,” they said. “So if I check the [memory] region and see a new string, I will go crazy with it so they think they are detecting real cheaters.”
Ultimately, a cheat developer called Zeebler, who had watched Vizor use the exploit to get players banned, provided a detailed overview of the exploit to Twitter, which is what tipped Activision off. “It was nice to see it get fixed and see unbans,” said an apparently unfazed Vizor. “I had my fun.”
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