In a rather bizarre and unexpected state of affairs, the core drivers of the new Ricochet anti-cheat system for Call of Duty: Warzone have already been leaked.
Taking to Twitter earlier today, both ModernWarzone and Anti-Cheat Police Department confirmed that the kernel-level drivers of Ricochet have landed on several cheat-related forums, following which cheat makers can now start reverse-engineering the anti-cheat system if they have not already.
🚨 BREAKING: Call of Duty's new RICOCHET Anti-Cheat has had it's Kernel Level driver leaked to cheat manufacturers, as confirmed by MWZ sources who wish to remain anonymous. 🚨
We are still awaiting an official response from Activision for this article.https://t.co/cKuOu3gHBV
— ModernWarzone (@ModernWarzone) October 14, 2021
Unfortunately, the kernel driver for @CallofDuty new Anti-cheat called RICOCHET got leaked today, and P2C devs are already reversing it, this is already very bad. pic.twitter.com/Vb8f3eXx5b
— Anti-Cheat Police Department 🕵️ (@AntiCheatPD) October 14, 2021
Making the situation even worse is that people who have had access to the leaked Ricochet drivers are stating the anti-cheat to be not as robust as claimed by publisher Activision. The notion being that whatever protection the anti-cheat was supposed to provide can be broken into quite easily.
Activision was rumored to be working on a brand new anti-cheat system for its Call of Duty franchise, which became official when Ricochet was announced barely a couple of days ago as “a multi-faceted approach to combat cheating.”
Ricochet has been designed to run on PC at the kernel level, which basically means that the anti-cheat can keep track of any suspicious software running on an operating system. A kernel-level anti-cheat is supposed to be foolproof but if its drivers have indeed been leaked, cheat makers can understand how the anti-cheat works and hence find a way to bypass its security measures altogether.
Ricochet will launch alongside Call of Duty: Vanguard on November 5, 2021. The anti-cheat will then launch for Warzone with the Pacific update afterwards. It is entirely possible that the anti-cheat will then be extended to cover Modern Warfare and Black Ops Cold War once the initial roll-outs are done.
