A major issue is unfolding across the PlayStation Black Ops ports right now. Just when many players thought the cheating had finally quieted down after a few clear days, a long-time familiar face has resurfaced and brought hacks right back into Black Ops 2 lobbies.
If you checked any of the Call of Duty Reddit subs or scrolled through Twitter over the last 24 hours, your feed was almost certainly flooded with two names: C Isnt Sharp and KEY_UNBOUND (+). Post after post pulled in hundreds of upvotes in subreddits that rarely see that kind of traffic anymore, like r/blackops2. A single thread on the sub almost garnered 1,000 upvotes, serving as a wake-up call for players who genuinely assumed these new PlayStation ports were safe from cheaters after the latest round of updates.
While modders dropping into public lobbies is nothing new for legacy titles, what went down in the NUKEJACKED playlist over the last two days has been a let down, especially since many thought the cheating wave was well behind us.
Social Media in a Frenzy
The post that first alerted the community was a Reddit thread titled “Aimbot on PS5 port about 5 minutes ago…”. The post featured a 26-second clip showing teammate C Isnt Sharp casually wiping out the entire enemy team over and over again. For most of the video, C Isnt Sharp was spinning in circles and firing blindly into walls while auto-headshots continuously filled the killfeed. Shortly after, multiple other posts began appearing on r/blackops2 from the perspective of opposing players trapped on the receiving end of C Isnt Sharp’s lobby takeover.
Over on Twitter, user CronoPSN ran into a different cheater operating under the gamertag KEY_UNBOUND (+). Playing on the opposing team, CronoPSN captured footage of KEY_UNBOUND (+) eliminating players while facing a completely different direction. The clip also captured the match leaderboard, showing KEY sitting at over 150 eliminations and completely destroying his opponents’ K/D ratios. Credit to the players in that lobby, though, several stayed through all 40+ deaths despite knowing there was literally no way to fight back against KEY.
The Dev Kit Problem
What makes these exploits far more worrisome than previous glitches comes down to hardware. Both C Isnt Sharp and KEY_UNBOUND (+) are almost certainly using developer kits (dev kits) to modify the game at the root level. This makes it a lot harder to eliminate these hackers from the game because they can spoof their consoles. Both accounts have been spotted joining the NUKEJACKED playlist back-to-back. Given that both accounts are the exact same level, run the exact same game mode, and surfaced on the exact same day, much of the community speculates they may actually be the same person operating under two different gamertags.
Give Iron Galaxy Some Credit
While this current situation threatens the long-term health of the game, it’s important to acknowledge that Iron Galaxy and Activision most likely have caught wind of this issue. As with the previous exploits in the game, it is safe to say they are not just sitting on their hands. In fact, compared to older Call of Duty Black Ops releases that were left to rot when cheaters moved in, this team has been remarkably vocal and fast on the draw. When the first wave of hacked lobbies hit, Activision immediately took to their official updates account on X to publicly acknowledge the cheating and outline their response.
They took direct action right away. They temporarily pulled entire game modes offline, such as Domination and Demolition, so they could isolate and investigate server-side vulnerabilities. When modders began giving victims negative experience points to lock them out of multiplayer entirely, the devs pushed out a server-side fix to stop it. They also deployed account rollbacks, setting affected accounts to Level 20 so legitimate players who got hit with negative XP could join public matches once again.
Given that they did not abandon the port right away, which they could have done, it’s safe to say the devs are likely watching this current dev-kit issue unfold and building a plan to stop it. If they’ve already invested real resources into squashing previous exploits, there’s every reason to believe they’ll address this one too, especially if more dev-kit hardware users find their way into the Black Ops port public lobbies.
Still, that track record is what makes this sudden surge of dev-kit cheaters so damning. Iron Galaxy has thrown everything they have at this game, yet exploiters like C Isnt Sharp and KEY_UNBOUND (+) have still managed to abuse public lobbies despite every single patch note released so far.
Hardware Bans, Dedicated Servers, and a Reset
Chasing dev-kit modders and hackers with endless software patches is often a losing game of whack-a-mole, especially since many dev-kit users spoof their hardware IDs or accounts to evade bans. Right now, the issue might feel slightly less rampant simply because the few dev-kit users on the Black Ops ports are vastly outnumbered by regular players on unmodified consoles. However, for anyone who ends up trapped in those hijacked lobbies, or for players who just want to enjoy specific playlists where dev-kit users cluster (like NUKEJACKED), the issue completely ruins the game.
The most worrying aspect of these dev-kit exploits is what they signal for the future of the game. Once the initial launch buzz fades and player counts inevitably dip, encountering a cheater will start to feel like an everyday occurrence. It’s almost guaranteed that C Isnt Sharp will still be around long after casual players move on, he’s already proven he enjoys low-population environments, having spent years playing on Xbox Black Ops 2 servers that peak around just 2,000 players. Iron Galaxy has proven they care enough to actively support this title, but Activision needs to give them the proper tools and infrastructure to make that effort count.
The cleanest and most effective path forward starts with finding a way to issue permanent hardware bans specifically targeting dev consoles and modified systems trying to access public lobbies. Activision and Iron Galaxy need to implement detection tools that recognize the unique hardware signatures of these dev kits and blacklist the hardware outright. Alongside hardware bans, Activision needs to pull P2P multiplayer offline so players stop getting trapped in broken or malicious lobbies, and fully migrate the networking so match authority lives exclusively on secure Activision servers rather than player-hosted consoles. Blacklisting dev-kit hardware and taking host control away from individual consoles neutralizes dev-kit injections once and for all.