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Call of Duty hacker says ‘I had fun’ after apparently wrongly banning thousands of Warzone and Modern Warfare 3 players

Umito November 9, 2024

Hacker says he has “thousands and thousands” of innocent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and War zone banned players using an in-game exploit Ricochet anti-cheat system this has since been resolved.

Last month, Activision said he had found and fixed an exploit in Ricochet that resulted in the banning of “a small number of legitimate players”, but a hacker going by Vizor said TechCrunch the number is much higher than that, and they know it because they are the ones responsible.

“I could have done this for years and as long as I was targeting random players and no one was known, it would have gone unnoticed,” said Vizor, who said it was “funny to abuse this exploit “.

The method by which Vizor was getting Call of Duty players wrongly banned seems ridiculously simple, which is surprising given all the talk about the robustness of the Ricochet anti-cheat system. According to Vizor, all they did was identify a list of hard-coded texts that Ricochet used to identify hackers, then send messages to players with these unique “signatures.” Bam, forbidden.

For example, Vizor said one of those signatures was “trigger bot,” which is a cheat tool that automatically triggers a cheater’s gun to fire when their crosshairs pass over a target. Ricochet was scanning players’ computers for this text string. So when Vizor sent a private message to a player using that specific language, it triggered an automatic ban.

“I realized that Ricochet’s anti-cheat was probably scanning players’ devices for strings to determine who was a cheater or not,” Vizor said. “This is pretty normal, but scanning that much memory space with just an ASCII string and disallowing it is extremely prone to false positives,” Vizor said.

“The same day I found out about this, I got banned by sending myself a Call of Duty whisper message with one of the strings in the message content.”

To maximize the ban’s effectiveness, Vizor said it developed a script that would program them to automatically join games, post messages with those trigger words, exit the game, then rinse and repeat. Activision would occasionally add new signatures to Ricochet, and Vizor would dig through the code to find them and use them to continue banning players.

“I was more active in trolling when (the) Ricochet anti-cheat team was adding new channel signatures,” they said. “So if I check the region (from memory) and see a new string, I’ll go crazy and they’ll think they’re detecting real cheaters.”

Ultimately, a cheat developer called Zeebler, who had seen Vizor use the exploit to ban players, provided a detailed overview of the exploit to Twitter, which alerted Activision. “It was nice to see the problem fixed and see the bans,” said a seemingly unfazed Vizor. “I had fun.”

Defeat your enemies fairly with our guide to best assault rifles in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.

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Call of Duty hacker says ‘I had fun’ after apparently wrongly banning thousands of Warzone and Modern Warfare 3 players

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Call of Duty hacker says ‘I had fun’ after apparently wrongly banning thousands of Warzone and Modern Warfare 3 players

Umito

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