Hackers. They can be a pretty common thing with online games these days. Usually, they cheat to give themselves an unfair edge against others or to get themselves extra benefits like XP. But what happens when hackers start targeting innocent players, and those players end up banned as a result? That's exactly what's been happening on the PC version of Battlefield 3 these days.
So let's say you're a Battlefield 3 hacker. You're annoyed that that the program Punkbuster has been finding and banning hackers since the days of the original Half-Life. So, naturally, the next step is to frame people who had nothing to do with you, but happen to be tied into a cheat-detection service named GGC-Stream. Then, it's time to go brag about it on the internet!
A junior member of a hacking website, ArtificialAiming.net, has done just that. He or she has helped frame players by making it appear as though the bystanders are the ones doing the hacking. According to a post made on the site's forums, the hacker anonpbspoofer has contributed to the banning of over 150 Battlefield 3 players.
"We are bringing back the unerring of punkbuster back for 3rd season," anonpbspoofer stated a post. "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 banning real players from battlelog while ggc-stream is totally unaware."
The folks at Artificial Aiming claim to have nothing to do with this, saying "This has nothing to do with AA. The person that posted the first link is a junior member." Kotaku reports that EA claims to be looking into the matter, while Tony Ray, the founder of Even Balance, the company behind Punkbuster, had his own side to share.
"This was an attack against a 3rd party admin group that uses PunkBuster to share ban information. The group of hackers/cheaters associated with the attack likes to trump up anything they can to claim some kind of victory to avert attention from the fact that we are catching their paid subscribers and banning them while they are claiming their hacks are undetectable. The 3rd party admin group should be able to easily remove the corrupted streaming from their system if they haven't already.
"It is always unfortunate when innocent players have their gameplay interrupted but it should be sorted out soon. In the mean time, there are plenty of game servers unaffected by this attack. Some players may need to branch out and try servers they don't normally play on for a while."
So let's say you're a Battlefield 3 hacker. You're annoyed that that the program Punkbuster has been finding and banning hackers since the days of the original Half-Life. So, naturally, the next step is to frame people who had nothing to do with you, but happen to be tied into a cheat-detection service named GGC-Stream. Then, it's time to go brag about it on the internet!
"We are bringing back the unerring of punkbuster back for 3rd season," anonpbspoofer stated a post. "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 banning real players from battlelog while ggc-stream is totally unaware."
The folks at Artificial Aiming claim to have nothing to do with this, saying "This has nothing to do with AA. The person that posted the first link is a junior member." Kotaku reports that EA claims to be looking into the matter, while Tony Ray, the founder of Even Balance, the company behind Punkbuster, had his own side to share.
"This was an attack against a 3rd party admin group that uses PunkBuster to share ban information. The group of hackers/cheaters associated with the attack likes to trump up anything they can to claim some kind of victory to avert attention from the fact that we are catching their paid subscribers and banning them while they are claiming their hacks are undetectable. The 3rd party admin group should be able to easily remove the corrupted streaming from their system if they haven't already.
"It is always unfortunate when innocent players have their gameplay interrupted but it should be sorted out soon. In the mean time, there are plenty of game servers unaffected by this attack. Some players may need to branch out and try servers they don't normally play on for a while."
Considering the fairly staggering amount of hacking and cheating that goes on with online games these days, why is this one event particularly significant? Maybe it's because nobody caught on until the culprit said something, maybe it's the number of people affected, or maybe it's the fact that innocent, completely un-involved users were punished to... what, exactly? Prove a point? It's the madness of it that earns significance.
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