An infamous new Call of Duty exploit that allows cheaters to ban anyone for no reason could be a lot worse than Activision says.

In October, before the launch of Black Ops 6, content creator BobbyPoff was permanently banned even though he had never cheated.

It turns out, and as confirmed by the developers, that this was due to a RICOCHET anti-cheat exploit that allows cheaters to falsely permaban players without them even being in the same lobby.

Although Activision claimed that only a “small number” of accounts were affected, an anti-cheat watchdog is sounding the alarm that this situation is worse than the developer is letting on.

“Over the past week, 2 separate exploits within RICOCHET and BattlEye have been released,” Anti-cheat PD wrote. “Both exploits allow attackers to permanently ban any player they choose. The exploits can work for any game using the respective anti-cheats.”

BattlEye is used for games such as PUBG and GTA Online and according to Zebleer, many more users have been affected than the “small number” reported by Activision. A number of GTA players even quit for a while as bans were imposed.

Zebleer revealed a post from the exploit’s founder which explained: “For some time it has been possible to permanently ban people by sending them a friend request or posting a message (“Nice Trigger Bot dude!”) in the game. cat.”

“I’m in a position where I can say that several thousand random COD players were banned by this exploit before streamers started being targeted,” they added.

X/zebleerpo

Thousands of users could have been banned due to the “trigger bot” exploit.

“Activision has already started unblocking accounts that were banned using this exploit, but this comes with a caveat: real cheaters who were caught by these signatures will also be unbanned. Additionally, Ricochet doesn’t seem to understand how many people were affected by this small number of claims.

On October 18, Activision released a blog detailing some of the RICOCHET upgrades that came with Black Ops 6, explaining that their goal is to catch and eliminate cheaters within an hour of their first match and that they are ramping up the detections.

As the war against cheaters rages on, we’ll have to see if the damage caused by this exploit will have serious ramifications once Black Ops 6 launches.