Activision Fixes Exploit That Allowed Players to Be Banned in Call of Duty

Activision has announced that it has fixed a “detection system bypass” in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone, which caused players to be banned by the Ricochet anti-cheat system. The company assured that the issue “affected a small number of player accounts,” and all impacted accounts have already been restored.

However, according to zebleer, the owner of the cheat-selling store Phantom Overlay, the problem was much more serious than Activision reported. Zebleer explained in detail on X (formerly Twitter) that the Ricochet anti-cheat scanned a player’s computer memory for cheat software, and one of the signatures it checked for was the text string: 54 72 69 67 65 72 20 42 6f 74 (“Trigger Bot”).

Because of this, “for quite a long period of time,” it was possible to trigger a permanent ban on any player simply by sending them a friend request with this phrase or by writing a message in the game chat like “Nice Trigger Bot dude!” This message would then end up in the victim’s computer memory and be scanned by Ricochet, resulting in a ban.

While Activision stated that only a “small number” of accounts were affected, zebleer claims that this exploit was used for months and bans hit several thousand random COD players. Eventually, someone started targeting major streamers, which brought more attention to the issue.

For example, zebleer notes that streamer BobbyPoff was among those banned. He was blocked on October 3, 2024, and was only unbanned at the end of last week. Like other players and streamers affected by these bans, BobbyPoff insisted he did not use cheat software.

Similar Issues in Other Games

It’s worth noting that a nearly identical problem was fixed in the BattlEye anti-cheat system at the end of last week. That exploit also allowed attackers to ban other players’ accounts and affected several games, including PUBG, Rainbow Six Siege, and Escape from Tarkov. All players affected by these bans have also been promised an unban soon.