Activision provided an update about their new RICOCHET anti-cheat for Call of Duty. They also claimed that they intentionally leaked a pre-release version of their new anti-cheat driver to some 3rd parties as part of their rigorous tests. This update follows the revelation that RICOCHET was in the hands of some cheat developers, as reported by ModernWarzone Twitter account.
As Activision explained in a tweet:
“RICOCHET Anti-Cheat is in controlled live testing. Before putting it on your PC, we’re testing the hell out of it,” and “Testing includes providing a pre-release version of the driver to select 3rd parties.”
While you would expect those third parties to be white hatted cheat developers only, according to the ModernWarzone report, it would seem some of those 3rd parties were cheat developers. Some people have argued that it makes sense to leak the system to the cheaters also, because Activision’s primary opponent with the new anti-cheat engine is the cheaters obviously.
But there’s at least one IT Risk Consultant who was highly skeptical of the claim that the company intentionally leaked its code to cheaters and talked about it. Also, in their new statement Activision didn’t specify cheaters, just ‘selected 3rd party.’ But from context, most people took their comment to mean they meant to give it to cheaters.
The IT Risk Consultant explained as: “I’m not 100% sure what got leaked, like if it was just the user version of the software or source code. But anti-cheat works because cheaters don’t know how it detects cheats. So why would you give cheat devs more opportunity to learn how your anti-cheat works? They probably can’t just reverse engineer it, but it gives them more time to test their cheats on it.”
When shown the information that was leaked to a forum, they explained that the screenshots were of a hex table, which would contain specific signatures for what the cheaters are looking for. And they explained it as “[it is] not great for cheat devs to have that.”
RICOCHET is scheduled to go live on November 5th with the Pacific update for Warzone and release of Vanguard. The highly anticipated anti-cheat is facing great expectations, as the COD community waits to see if this can finally address the massive cheating problem that has been plaguing Call of Duty over the past couple of years.
