While Treyarch and Activision rarely comment on their anti-cheating efforts, they do occasionally release updates and statistics; indications of how many thousands of accounts have been banned, for example. However, it often seems that they are a step behind, and Call of Duty: Warzone’s latest major hack seems to be particularly troublesome.
Call of Duty: Warzone’s Troubling “Silent Aim” Hack
A new aiming hack known as “Silent Aim” first surfaced in Call of Duty: Warzone back in May. In practice, Silent Aim works like a traditional aimbot, but is even more advanced. So long as the cheater shoots vaguely in another player’s direction, the game will read that the shot landed and kill the apparent target. Silent Aim’s over-compensation is particularly extreme, however. Players barely need to aim at all or even aim-down-sights to score instant kill-shots, with the cheat accounting for recoil and other factors without issue.
The biggest problem with Silent Aim isn’t this artifical lethality though. Rather, the issue is in how easy it is to use, and get away with using. Other aimbots are easy to spot because the cheater’s character will instantaneously snap to their target. Not so with Silent Aim. This means that its users are less likely to be identified by other players in their games. (And thus, less likely to be manually reported, a practice which accounts for many account bans in Warzone.)
Back in May, Activision revealed that their anti-cheating team had banned more than 475,000 Call of Duty: Warzone accounts. While this appears to be a massive number, note that the bans are for “accounts” rather than players. Unfortunately, cheat engines are available which can block hardware bans issued by Activision. This means that the worst repeat offenders can be extremely difficult to remove permanently. As such, it remains unclear what Activision’s anti-cheat team will be able to do to deal with Silent Aim and other widespread hacking tools.