My Anti-Cheat Work at Activision, in Public Releases
I work on machine learning for RICOCHET Anti-Cheat at Activision, on Call of Duty. Most of what a security team builds never gets talked about publicly, for obvious reasons. But Activision does publish progress reports, and a fair amount of what I have worked on shows up in them.
This page is my index of those releases: the public post, and one line on what it covered. The summaries are drawn from Activision’s own announcements. Anything not published, I am not going to discuss here.
Machine learning detection
| Date | Release | What it covered |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-11-09 | Machine learning and Replay progress report | ML examining client and server data for new cheat behaviours, and prioritising suspicious Replay clips for review. |
| 2024-10-18 | ML anomaly and aimbot models | Anomaly models, new behavioural systems, and detection models analysing gameplay specifically to combat aimbots. |
| 2024-11-13 | Anomalous skill behavioural model | A behavioural model for anomalous skill, processing up to 4.4 million data points per hour and flagging accounts for human review. |
| 2024-12-16 | Replay render farm and AI training | Replay outputs used to validate detections and to generate training data for the AI systems. |
| 2025-01-17 | Behavioural aimbot detection | Updated behavioural detection models explicitly covering aimbotting, plus account-trust signals. |
| 2025-03-28 | Aimbot and Replay ML update | Further aimbot detection work, and an ML system analysing game replays. |
| 2025-05-07 | Video Replay ML | Video and game data analysed together to estimate the probability of wallhacking and produce a suspiciousness score for human validation. |
Third-party hardware detection
| Date | Release | What it covered |
|---|---|---|
| 2023-04-04 | Third-party hardware detection | Global detection for controller passthrough hardware that modifies gameplay and reduces or eliminates recoil. |
| 2023-06-29 | Hardware detection results | A 59% reduction in use of the targeted third-party devices in the first two weeks. |
| 2025-01-17 | Hardware identification | Hardware-identification and account-trust systems aimed at repeat offenders. |
| 2025-05-07 | Hardware enforcement | Hardware makers working to circumvent detection, and the enforcement response to it. |
Boosting, teaming, and real-time mitigations
| Date | Release | What it covered |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-08-06 | Anti-boosting and teaming security | Security work targeting boosting and teaming, where the abuse is coordination between accounts rather than a client-side cheat. |
| 2025-09-10 | Real-time mitigations | Detection driving mitigations inside the match rather than bans after it, with 55,000+ cheaters disrupted in a month, and mitigation telemetry fed back to learn player behaviour. |
Ps. Nothing here goes beyond what Activision has already published, and nothing I say on this site has ties to my employer unless I specifically mention it.