Roblox is one of the biggest games in the world and is very popular with children. However, the gaming platform is repeatedly plagued by hackers. Now players were automatically banned by an exploit. The alleged hackers say they have more attacks planned.
What was that exploit? Roblox is a kind of huge construction kit in which players can develop their own game modes and play them together with others. The game is extremely successful, had over 150 million monthly active players during the corona pandemic and is more valuable on the stock exchange than Activision Blizzard.
However, the servers created by other players also carry a certain risk. There was an exploit in chat moderation on some of these servers. The automatic moderation was fooled into believing that the player who joined had said bad things. This was apparently followed by an automatic ban.
The developers of Roblox confirmed to PCGamesN that such a problem happened. Players are encouraged to report malicious content and initiate an appeal process if they believe they have been unfairly banned.
Hackers and other problems surrounding Roblox are nothing new. We already wrote about it in early 2022:
Report shows: The world’s largest gaming platform for children is a hacker’s paradise
Alleged hackers say, “We’re just doing this for fun”
Who is behind this exploit? That’s not entirely clear. According to the Roblox RTC Twitter account, the owner of the server became Crosswinds [A.2] permanently blocked. He was probably the first user to use this exploit.
According to Roblox RTC, the popular “Kohl’s Admin” plugin was also suspect. However, it turned out that probably only copies of the plugin that were used for other servers.
In this context, however, Roblox RTC shared a statement from Discord user Syntax 64. He claims to be behind the campaign together with others. They wanted to send a wake-up call to the developers, because the problem is said to have been known to them for more than a year.
However, Roblox’s ignorant behavior makes the attackers want to continue:
Just to be clear, we’re not pretending to be noble people helping Roblox keep being lazy and patching their platform. I personally don’t care what happens because I’ve already lost hope for the company as a whole. We’re just here now and doing it for fun. We don’t care what kind of influence our action has on cooperations.
How can I protect myself from such attacks or exploits? Basically, you should not trust anyone in Roblox. Especially in children’s accounts, the option “No one” should be selected in the “Privacy” area for the option: “Who can chat with me”.
You should also check exactly which servers are being played on. It also plays a role here which settings have been made in the account. If the correct age has been entered for children, servers that are more violent will be hidden.
You can find out more about safety in our interview with Laura Higgins, Director of Community Safety and Digital Civility at Roblox Corporation: Roblox has been a large social network for children since Corona – but these dangers are lurking.
Even though much of the article sounds like Roblox has some problems, the game is still very popular with children and offers many opportunities. In his 2019 article, our former author Andreas Bertits revealed how parents can best deal with the topic:
“Dad, I want more Robux!” – How to deal with my gamer kids