Activision Claims Anti-Cheat Fix for Modern Warfare III and Warzone Hacks

Activision announced that it has "disabled a workaround to a detection system" within Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone that led to the erroneous banning of legitimate players by the Ricochet anti-cheat system. The company stated that the issue "impacted a small number of legitimate player accounts," and all affected accounts have since been restored.

However, according to zebleer, who operates the Phantom Overlay store that sells cheat software, the issue is more significant than indicated by Activision’s statement. In a detailed post on X, zebleer explained that when Ricochet scanned players’ computer memory to identify known cheat software, one of the signatures it looked for was a plaintext string: "54 72 69 67 67 65 72 20 42 6f 74" (Trigger Bot).

Zebleer claims that due to this, it was possible for some time to have a player permanently banned by sending them a friend request containing the phrase or by posting a message such as "Nice Trigger Bot dude!" in the game’s chat. This would cause the string to appear in their memory and be flagged by Ricochet.

Despite Activision reporting that only a "small number" of legitimate accounts were affected, zebleer alleges that "several thousand random COD players were banned by this exploit" before it began affecting prominent streamers.

Zebleer highlighted the case of BobbyPoff, a Call of Duty streamer, who was affected by this exploit since October 3rd but was recently unbanned. Like other players and streamers involved in the bans, there was much speculation and debate about the possibility of BobbyPoff being a cheater, even as he maintained his innocence and some individuals posted humorous videos.

The Call of Duty Updates account mentioned that the Ricochet team plans to release a blog post the following day, though it did not confirm whether the post would address this particular exploit. Activision has not yet responded to requests for comment.

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