From the Battlefieldo webiste. ----------------------------With any game, there are always obnoxious goons who hack, cheat, and manipulate game data and code to gain an unfair advantage. Well, now a group of goons have gone a step further. A group has taken the liberty of spoofing other players' GUIDs and cheating... causing that (innocent) player's GUID to then be banned by GGC, requiring them to go through the appeal process. In plain English, this means that hackers are disguising themselves with other players' GUIDs which means that instead of the hacker being banned, their innocent victim is banned instead. Here is what they posted on their website: 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. We made it possible for ggc-stream to find 5 of them recently to expose how flawed their system is. http://s18.postimage.org/tq4r2zmif/framedplayer5.png http://s18.postimage.org/gflhn7lbr/framedplayer4.png http://s18.postimage.org/5eqci6t2v/framedplayer3.png http://s18.postimage.org/u6pypfa9j/framedplayer2.png http://s18.postimage.org/wmrs39sc7/framedplayer1.png They even denied appeals of players we framed saying the bans were legit. They posted on BATTLELOG http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3...4347841952673/ We even banned a few esl admins for bf3 which ggc quickly removed.Why is nothing being done about this? To make matters worse, they actually have a Battlog Platoon! When will the nonsense stop? For now, we suggest not playing on GGC Streaming Servers. --------------------------------------------So to get things clear, this is about GGC streaming servers and not PBbans like we do. There are loads of false accusations that just say that every streaming service is like GGC. From the PBBans website ------------------------------------------- After the recent fake ban events at GGC-Stream this week it's no secret that streaming is not completely secure. It has never been completely secure and the events of 2008 brought that to light. At which time we informed our streaming admins about the situation and possible solutions. The solution was to either close down for good or continue and tighten our security. Streaming admins wanted to continue so that was our decision. The known fake bans exploit involves using an application to hook into a server and edit its memory to falsify PB logs streamed to a 3rd party. In order for that to happen the person must have full access to the server. In the case of Battlefield 3 the leaked server files could be used to achieve that goal. The mass fake ban attack in 2008 was a wakeup call for us and we took it very seriously. That is the reason we have the high streaming requirements of requiring teams to have a working website, roster, forums showing activity to name a few. The rest of those requirements can be found here. It's why we: - manually approve all newly added servers to stream - manually approve all newly added users to existing streaming accounts - don't allow free online email accounts for streaming applicants. - don't allow home servers to stream - don't allow teams with cheaters to stream - don't allow any server whose IP is found in the MPi (used by a player) to stream - don't allow cracked servers to stream - don't show the full 32 character GUID for clean players. We also provide many details for all our bans to aid players in the appeal process should they wish to do so. That includes the server log entry of the violation raised, the server ip and group it belongs to, the guid, alias and IP address of the player. Should any player end up on our banlist they always have the option to appeal. We treat ban appeals very seriously at PBBans. For example if a ban was the result of a PB raised violation from Even Balance (Violation #50000+) then we have the user submit a ticket to Even Balance. If they say it's a false positive or there is no record of a person with that violation (can be caused by network errors) then we lift the ban. For MD5 tool bans if we do not have the exact cheat file (using MD5 checksum) in our database we lift the ban. Better to let a cheater go free than to keep an innocent player banned. Streaming was never a 100% secure system and technically any system where logs are sent to a remote location could also suffer the same problem. We knew the problem existed in 2008 and took the above steps (plus others) to help protect server admins and players from being exploited.
