Black Ops 7 Player Discovers Aimbot Cheat Counter With In-Game Item

A Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 player has found that a simple cosmetic item may be all it takes to counter aimbots. Developers today have gone to great lengths to crack down on cheaters, but some still manage to slip through the cracks, especially in a franchise as popular as CoD. As the team behind Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 continues to ramp up its anti-cheat efforts, at least one fan has taken things into their own hands.

Cheating is nothing new and certainly not exclusive to any one game. Still, Activision’s shooter series seems to struggle with it more than most. A recent study found that Call of Duty has the most cheaters of any online game, with 66 searches for cheats for every 1,000 players. It’s worth noting that this study measured how often players were looking for cheats, not necessarily how many actually succeeded in cheating, but it’s still a frustrating sign for CoD fans. Thankfully, though, it seems there may be an easy solution for some of these instances.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 Player Combats Aimbots with Spray

YouTuber and CoD player LunchTime shared an unusual but seemingly effective way to counter aimbots: a spray called Threat Marked. After LunchTime tagged a wall with the spray, another player using an AI aimbot accidentally locked onto the spray first, not an actual player, giving LunchTime a window to fire back. It’s not the sort of thing that would likely work perfectly every time, but putting enough of the tag around a map could confuse aimbots enough to give other players a fighting chance. Activision also once claimed its anti-cheat measures have blocked cheaters from 99% of early Black Ops 7 matches, so if that’s still an accurate figure, the strategy will only be necessary in roughly 1% of games.

Some players have doubted the efficacy of this technique. As some of them point out, this only works against AI aimbots that look for targets resembling other players, not anything that locks onto an actual hitbox. Still, even if it’s of limited use, it’s impressive that something so simple can work even some of the time. LunchTime managed to counter an aimbot with a cosmetic from a $20 bundle, compared to Call of Duty‘s rather complex RICOCHET Anti-Cheat system, which relies on kernel-level drivers and real-time data analysis.

CoD fans may not need to rely on the Threat Marked spray as a backup anti-aimbot strategy for long. Activision says Black Ops 7 Season 3 will add new security measures to keep cheaters out of matches. These include a new multi-factor authentication requirement to stop banned players from making new accounts, updated attestation messaging to make it harder to slip by the game’s TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot requirements, and improved cheating device detection methods. Images of other players spread across the map were not one of the listed fixes, though, although these more sophisticated measures may be more reliable than LunchTime’s spray technique.

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It remains to be seen how much these improvements will help cheating in Black Ops 7. It’s also unclear if Activision will make any changes to its anti-cheat methods in the Call of Duty rumored to come out in October 2026, though it’s safe to assume the next game’s security measures will at least be on the same level as the current solution. Anyone doubtful about that can cross their fingers for another spray similar to Threat Marked as a contingency anti-cheat plan.