How a single hacker got thousands banned in Call of Duty via an exploit in anti-cheat

Call of Duty remains one of the most popular video games of all time and thanks to that, it also attracts cheaters. To counter them, Activision made Ricochet anti-cheat, however, in October 2024, a hacker used an exploit in the anti-cheat to ban thousands of legitimate players. The exploit was later fixed with people getting unbanned.

However, the question remained how does this exploit work? Talking about the whole ordeal, the hacker behind this named ‘Vizor’ recently talked to TechCrunch telling how well they could have hidden the exploit and continued doing this for years by avoiding popular people in that space. Vizor also revealed that the ban scale was much larger than reported by Activision.

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How does the Ricochet anti-cheat exploit work?

The exploit is currently fixed, but Vizor revealed how they were able to trick the anti-cheat into banning innocent users. As per the hacker, Ricochet used specific hardcoded strings of text for example ‘Trigger Bot’ in order to detect cheaters.

Since the anti-cheat for COD was looking for these hardcoded strings, all they had to do was send a private message to the player with one of these hardcoded strings and the player got flagged and banned.

“I realized that Ricochet anti-cheat was likely scanning players’ devices for strings to determine who was a cheater or not. 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,” Vizor revealed.

Once they found this, it was open season for them. The hacker even developed a script that would join games, drop the message and leave which allowed them to ban thousands of players without even sitting in front of the computer.

Even when Activision added new signatures, they were quickly discovered and used to troll people. The unwarranted bans ended after multiple popular CoD creators/Streamers were banned which caused Activision to look into this. "It was nice to see it get fixed and see unbans. I had my fun," said Vizor.