A look at “aimbot” and “wallhack” cheating going on in PC games like CoD: Warzone and Destiny 2, as game developers announce big updates to respond to cheating
If you've ever played a PC game that has a competitive element, you've probably played against a cheater. Tweets: @tomwarren Tweets: Tom Warren / @tomwarren : The world's biggest PC games are fighting a new surge of cheaters and hackers. Here's my look at the aimbot and wallhack cheating going on in CoD: Warzone, Destiny 2, Valorant, PUBG, Overwatch, and more: https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Tom Warren's May 2020 survey documents an aimbot and wallhack surge across the biggest competitive PC games — Call of Duty: Warzone, Destiny 2, Valorant, PUBG, Overwatch — just as developers roll out major anti-cheat updates in response. It is the opening move of an arms race that the rest of this coverage tracks: within a year, Activision was warning Warzone players that a popular 'cheat' was actually malware that hands hackers control of their machine, and by late 2021 it shipped Ricochet, a kernel-level driver with machine-learning behavior analysis.
The escalation runs both ways. Cheat makers moved to computer-vision tools like CVCheat that claim undetectable auto-aim on any platform, while publishers took the fight to court — a US jury found AimJunkies' owner Phoenix Digital guilty of violating Bungie copyrights over Destiny 2 cheats, and Riot's anti-cheat chief Phillip Koskinas later described deliberately discrediting cheat developers.
First-order effects
- Players of Warzone, Destiny 2, Valorant, PUBG, and Overwatch are directly affected right now: matches are being distorted by aimbots and wallhacks, and the named developers are responding with large anti-cheat updates announced alongside this report.
Second-order effects
- Cheat distribution becomes a security problem for the same players it exploits — as Activision's later malware warning shows, buyers of popular cheats can be handing their machines to hackers, forcing publishers to police cheat downloads as well as cheat use.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, anti-cheat becomes structural rather than reactive: kernel-level drivers and ML detection like Ricochet, legal action against cheat vendors like the Phoenix Digital/Bungie case, and counter-intelligence tactics like Riot's — with cheat makers answering with hardware-agnostic computer-vision tools that no single game's client can see.
The trend: Competitive PC gaming is locked into an escalating anti-cheat arms race spanning kernel drivers, machine learning, litigation, and now computer vision — one data point being the 2020 surge Tom Warren documented across Warzone, Destiny 2, Valorant, PUBG, and Overwatch.