“Thousands of Call of Duty players have been kicked out of the game by exploiting flaws in anti-cheat tools,” hacker says – GIGAZINE

Activision’s popular FPS “Call of Duty” series has a system that operates at the kernel level as an approach to counter cheating.RICOCHET Anti-CheatAn anti-cheat system called “ has been adopted. However, a hacker named “Vizor” has testified that he has exploited this flaw in “RICOCHET Anti-Cheat” to banish thousands of general users from the game.

Hacker says they banned ‘thousands’ of Call of Duty gamers by abusing anti-cheat flaw | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/07/hacker-says-they-banned-thousands-of-call-of-duty-gamers-by-abusing-anti-cheat-flaw/

For years, hackers have targeted online video games, trying to find flaws that allow them to install and use cheats and other things that give players an unfair advantage. Some cheat developers make millions of dollars (hundreds of millions of yen) by selling programs that give games an unfair advantage as a service.appearI’m here.

Game developers, on the other hand, employ cybersecurity experts to develop and fine-tune their anti-cheat systems. One of these is Activision’s RICOCHET Anti-Cheat, which operates at the kernel level, making it difficult for cheat developers to try to circumvent the system.

“Call of Duty” developer announces kernel-level cheat countermeasure “Ricochet anti-cheat” – GIGAZINE

However, Mr. Vizor said he found a unique way to expel regular players from the game by abusing RICOCHET Anti-Cheat. According to Vizor, RICOCHET Anti-Cheat uses specific hard-coded strings as “signatures” to detect cheating. For example, a cheat called “Trigger Bot” automatically fires a bullet when you aim at a target.

Mr. Vizor used an in-game feature called “Whisper” that allows you to send private messages to other players, and was sending hard-coded texts such as “Trigger Bot”. As a result, the user who sent the message will be kicked out of the game.

Vizor says, “We have noticed that RICOCHET Anti-Cheat is likely scanning a player’s device for strings of characters to determine who is cheating and who is not. ASCII strings. Scanning this much memory space alone and trying to kick a player out of the game is very prone to false positives.”

Furthermore, Mr. Vizor said that he has developed a script that is automatically executed to “join a game, send a message, leave the game, and join a new game.” Mr. Vizor’s hack using a script lasted several months, and Activision apparently continued to add new signatures to RICOCHET Anti-Cheat during that time.

“We’ve been doing these hacks for years,” Vizor said. “It’s a very interesting experience to take advantage of corporate exploits.”

A person who has worked on developing security and anti-cheat tools at Activision said, “It’s unbelievable and stupid that Activision would ban a user just because they found the string “Trigger Bot.” Anti-Cheat should have protected the signature from being exploited.”

In addition, Mr. Zebleer, who is familiar with hacking in the Call of Duty series, explains the flaws used in this hack.

Call of Duty’s official account also commented on the issue, saying, “We have identified and disabled a workaround to our detection system in RICOCHET Anti-Cheat. Although a small number of legitimate player accounts were affected by this workaround. “We have restored all affected accounts,” the company said in a statement.