Activision claims it fixed a "workaround" in Call of Duty's anti-cheat system that banned "a small number of innocent gamers," but a cheater claims they could ban anyone just by typing two words into the chat.

Automated anti-cheat software can do a lot in a short time. Take Ricochet, the anti-cheat program in Call of Duty. It's a kernel-level software that has banned hundreds of thousands of cheater account since its introduction. Automated anti-cheat can sometimes be misused for evil. Activision announced today that they recently "disabled" a workaround in their systems that was banning innocent players.

A tweet today from the Call of Duty updates account stated that "RICOCHET Anti-Cheat has identified and disabled a hack to a detection system found in Modern Warfare III, and Call of Duty: Warzone which affected a small number of genuine player accounts." "We have restored the affected accounts." Our systems were examined for safety, and the monitoring will continue.

The statement does not mention what this problematic workaround was. However, it is possible that Activision has closed an exploit which allegedly allowed anyone weaponize Ricochet to any account they chose. Yikes.

In an article published on Twitter, first spotted by The Verge, cheat developers claim people have been using the "remote permanent ban" exploit to target random players and streamers for months. All it took to get banned was typing two words in chat while they were in the same lobby: Trigger Bot.

If the exploit is accurate, Ricochet creates an exact signature in your RAM that signals that a known hack is present on your computer. The cheat developer claims that it is possible to create a false ban simply by typing these signatures into chat, and injecting them directly into the system memory of players. One of the detected phrases was supposedly "Trigger Bot," which is a type of cheating that clicks for you. So exploiters could send messages like "Nice Trigger Bot", in game chat, or through a friend request user name and trigger a banning.

At least one well known streamer believes he was the target of this exploit. BobbyPoff, a Warzone streamer, spent weeks fighting online cheating accusations and appealing to Activision following his account being permanently banned on October 3. Yesterday, his account was restored. But not before he became the subject of a parody video called "It Wasn’t Me".

We can't confirm the exploit is real, and we can't test it now since Activision has fixed it. But the claims are consistent with Activision describing the problem as "a workaround of a detector system". It's unclear how many accounts were affected by this mess. Activision says "a small number", but who knows when they regularly ban tens of thousand players.