48,000 Warzone and Vanguard cheater accounts have been banned

Activision issued another major Call of Duty ban wave on Tuesday.

The company said today that 48,000 “cheater accounts” were banned yesterday across Call of Duty: Vanguard and Warzone.

Activision claimed in August that it had issued over 500,000 Warzone permabans since the free-to-play shooter launched in March 2020.

The publisher rolled out Warzone’s anti-cheat kernel-level driver globally last week.

The driver, which will be released for Call of Duty: Vanguard at a later date, automatically installs alongside a Warzone Pacific update on Battle.net and is required to play the game on PC.

https://twitter.com/CallofDuty/status/1473746439553617923?s=20

It “operates with high privileges on your computer, able to access all resources on your system while it is running”.

According to an Activision FAQ, this allows the game to detect any anti-cheat software that may be running in the background.

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It states that cheating software has become more sophisticated and is now able to manipulate the game’s code without running in the game itself. This can make it impossible to detect with in-game anti-cheat methods.

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The driver allows the game to monitor any other applications that may be running at the same time, which lets Warzone’s anti-cheat team figure out whether a player was using an unauthorised process to manipulate the game.

Although the driver is required to play Warzone, Activision claims it will only run while users are playing the game and will shut down as soon as they exit.