A new type of Aimbot caused many players concern – it would have affected other shooters besides Call of Duty. Now the developer is giving up.
Update from 14 July 2021: Good news from the cheater front! Many worried gamers can breathe a sigh of relief as Activision has stopped a new type of Aimbot before it was released. Not only Call of Duty: Warzone, but also other shooters could have suffered massively from the new technology – you can read more about it below in our original report.
The inventor of the cheat program has closed his website, where you can now only find the following statement:
“Team, this statement was not requested. However, at the request of Activision Publishing Inc (“Activision”), I will no longer develop or provide access to software that could be used to exploit their games. I never intended to do anything illegal. At the end of the video that drew so much attention to the project, it says “coming soon”. The software was never released.
This kind of technology has other merits – for example, movements could be controlled using a webcam pointed at you without the use of limbs. Unfortunately, I won’t be developing it further because of the potential negative impact.”
Many players had feared that the novel programme would exacerbate the massive cheater problem on consoles as well. In addition, the technology would have been extremely difficult to detect because it would have been streamed via a secondary device. Read more about the background here in our original report.
Original report: The fact that Call of Duty: Warzone has a big problem with cheaters, hackers and cheats is nothing new: New absurd hacks keep popping up, most recently cheaters didn’t even have to look at their enemies and could bounce bullets off walls. Even the creative director of Raven Software already complained that the hackers were ruining his heart’s project.
There is no end in sight to the problem; in fact, it could soon get worse: According to an anti-cheat analyst, the next generation of Aimbot is now available and becoming more popular.
New Aimbot relies on machine learning
The new cheat programme masters the typical functions expected of such an Aimbot: Enemies are automatically targeted at lightning speed and even shot directly if desired. The Twitter account Anti-Cheat Police Departments, which is run by Riot Games employee and anti-cheat analyst GamerDoc, shows the whole thing in a video:
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you the next generation of cheating now available on console, and has been for a while but lately its been becoming more popular and more of a trend, consoles are no longer a safe space to play your games legit anymore pic.twitter.com/iEQzPVFf1h
— Anti-Cheat Police Department 🕵️ (@AntiCheatPD) July 5, 2021
That’s why the cheat is so dangerous: The new hack apparently relies on a completely new way of working. A sophisticated programme supported by machine learning sends gameplay videos to a second PC via a network stream or capture card. There, the screen information is read out and processed. Then the cheat programme sends controller inputs back to the PC that is actually being played on – all in real time, of course.
This not only works with two PCs, but should also make cheating on consoles possible. According to the anti-cheat expert, this new method could theoretically be detected, but should cause developers a major headache when implementing countermeasures.
Another problem: In the video, the cheat developers claim that their hack should not only work in CoD Warzone, but in every shooter. Since an enormous amount of money is earned with such programmes, an end to the fight against the cheater plague is far from in sight.
