Activision, a big name in video games, said in October that it had fixed a bug in its anti-cheat system that was banning “a small number of legitimate player accounts.”
The hacker who found and was using the bug said that they were able to ban “thousands upon thousands” of Call of Duty players by making them look like they were cheating. Someone hacking under the name Vizor talked to Parhlo World about the flaw and gave their side of the story.
Vizor said, “I could have done this for years and no one would have known as long as I picked random players and not famous ones.” He also said, “It was funny to abuse the exploit.”
Zebleer, a cheat creator who knows a lot about the Call of Duty hacking scene, told Parhlo World about Vizor. Zebler said he had been in touch with Vizor for months and knew about the trick, which he said he had seen Vizor use.
Hackers have been going after online video games for years, looking for holes that can be used to add and use cheats that give players an unfair edge. Some cheat creators, like Zebler, sell their tools as a service and make a lot of money that way. Because of this, video game companies have been hiring hacking experts to build and improve their anti-cheat systems so that cheaters can be caught and banned. Activision launched the Ricochet anti-cheat system in 2021. It works at the kernel level to make it even harder for people who make cheats to get around it.
They said they were able to find a special way to break Ricochet and use it against the people it was meant to protect. The hacker found out that Ricochet was using a list of unique text strings that were hardcoded as “signatures” to find hackers. Vizor said that one of the strings had the words “Trigger Bot” on it. This is the name of a type of cheat that makes a cheater’s weapon fire automatically when their crosshair is over a target.
Vicor said that all they had to do was send a “whisper” message to a player that included one of these hardcoded lines, like “Trigger Bot,” and that player would be banned from the game.
“I realised that Ricochet anti-cheat was probably looking for strings on players’ devices to see who was cheating.” It’s pretty normal to do this, but “scanning this much memory space with just an ASCII string and banning based on that is very likely to give false positives,” Vizor said, referring to the fact that the game was searching for banned keywords in any given situation.
“I banned myself on the same day I found this by sending myself a whisper message on Call of Duty with one of the strings in it,” Vizor said.
Vizor said that at one point, they made a script that would automatically ban random players. The script would “join a game, post a message, leave the game, join a new game, repeat, repeat, repeat,” as Vizor put it. This way, they could go on vacation and still ban people. As they worked on this for months, Vizor said that Activision would add new signatures to its anti-cheat system. Soon after, they would find these signatures and use them to ban people.
“When the Ricochet anti-cheat team added new string signatures, that’s when I did the most trolling.” “So if I look in the memory area and see a new string, I’ll play with it until they think they’re finding real cheaters,” Vizor said.
Activision did not answer when asked for a response.
According to someone who used to work at Activision and still knows about the company’s security and anti-cheat team’s work, Ricochet was looking for certain signatures and “that may have been weaponised against the anti-cheat.” This is the same method Vizor was using.
“If you know what signature the anti-cheat is looking for, I can get those bytes into your game process and ban you,” the person, who did not want to be named, said. I find it hard to believe that [Activision] is blocking people based on a memory scan of “trigger bot.” What a stupid thing to do. Also, they should have kept the signatures safe. “That’s not very good.”
Vizor said they went after both random people and well-known players. Some video game streamers said on X that they had been blocked and then unbanned after Activision fixed the bug during the time that Vizor was using the exploit.
Zebleer informed the company of the bug’s presence by writing about how to use it on X.
Also Read: Hackers Broke Into Microsoft to Find Out What the Company Knows About Them
He said, “It was nice to see it get fixed and see people get unbanned.” “I had fun.”
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