News

Hacker using Punkbuster to frame innocent Battlefield 3 gamers
Posted: 24.01.2012 19:54 by JonahFalcon Comments: 4
One member of the game-hacking site Artificial Aiming has decided to ruin the experience of regular gamers in a more disruptive way than just cheating: the hacker is using Punkbuster to ban innocent players on Battlefield 3.

According to Artificial Aiming user anonpbspoofer, "We are bringing back the unerring of punkbuster back for a 3rd season. We have selected ggc-stream as the target since they have the most streaming bf3 servers and makes it very easy to add fake bans. In 2011 we hit them with a mass ban wave and now were are banning real players from battlelog while ggc-stream is totally unaware. We have framed 150+ bf3 players alone."

Of course, the players who got banned by Punkbuster wrongfully are up in arms. In a forum post called "Punkbuster got hacked. We got banned," one user raged "So it looks like the hackers/cheaters are unhappy and are now targeting innocent people?"

While some members of Artificial Aiming approve of the hacker's actions, staffer Doober dismissed anonpbspoofer, saying, "This has nothing to do with AA. The person who posted the first link is a junior member here."

As for Electronic Arts, the publisher posted the following official statement, "We are aware that some Battlefield 3 players are experiencing connection issues with PunkBuster enabled servers. This problem is limited to a small subset of players on PC and will not impact players on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. We are actively looking into the specifics of this issue and we are confident that we will have a permanent solution in place shortly. In the meantime, if a player's connectivity has been affected, we recommend that in the interim they join servers that are not running PunkBuster. There is a filter setting for this in the multiplayer server browser."

Punkbuster has been criticized in the past of not being able to stop hackers from employing their cheats. Now it seems that it's being used as a weapon against the very same gamers it is supposed to protect.
Source: Kotaku
Related games: Battlefield 3 (PC)

Comments

By Chosen_One (SI Elite) on Jan 24, 2012
Chosen_One
Yup, my brother got banned from all official ranked servers.
By nocutius (SI Elite) on Jan 24, 2012
nocutius
Ok, this kid deserves a beating. Ruining other people's fun just for the sake of it is just lame.
By herodotus (SI Herodotus) on Jan 25, 2012
herodotus
I'm afraid EA and Dice, the latter [supposedly] monitoring the cheating situation have absolutely dropped the ball with "BF3" security. They ban posts 'outing' cheaters, which is so wrong on so many levels yet are 'seen' to be idle while cheaters rule the servers. It is up to individual Admins to try and take some control of a situation already well out of hand.
The PB hack has been well known since 2008 with "BF2" and anything else supporting PB so it's nothing new. What may be new are potential Class Actions brought against EA by seriously pi$%ed off players. Several Aussies have already reported EA to the Department of Fair Trading here and the cases are under active review.
By truthfreak (I just got here) on Jun 24, 2012
truthfreak
Punkbuster works just as it should do
The spoofed bans exploit is confined to third party anti cheat sites.
When the exploit was first used back in 2008 third party anti cheat sites were faced with a dilema ... they could ignore the security loophole and carry on regardless, or try to tighten their own security.
GGC, GV, AON decided to ignore and carry on and they are the sites still getting spoofed bans in their systems.
pbbans has not been hit since 2008 because they are the only ones who tightened up security.
I would have thought any class actions should be brought against those who have ignored a security issue and just carried on regardless.
The spoof bans have nothing to do with EA/DiCE or PB.
They have everything to do with GGC-stream.com