A group of hackers have launched an attack on innocent Battlefield 3 players in order to voice their hate for the anti-cheat system PunkBuster.

Users are finding themselves banned from servers that use the system and are repeatedly getting kicked with error messages. One of the hackers posted on the site Artificial Aiming: ”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.”

Artificial Aiming have declared that are not affiliated with the hack, however they do support it.

EA released a statement on the issue: ”We are aware that some Battlefield 3 players are experiencing connection issues with PunkBuster enabled servers. This problem is limited to a small subset of players on PC and will not impact players on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.”We are actively looking into the specifics of this issue and we are confident that we will have a permanent solution in place shortly. In the meantime, if a player’s connectivity has been affected, we recommend that in the interim they join servers that are not running PunkBuster. There is a filter setting for this in the multiplayer server browser.”

Tony Ray, founder of Even Balance, the company responsible for PunkBuster told Kotaku: ”This was an attack against a 3rd party admin group that uses PunkBuster to share ban information. The group of hackers/cheaters associated with the attack likes to trump up anything they can to claim some kind of victory to avert attention from the fact that we are catching their paid subscribers and banning them while they are claiming their hacks are undetectable. The 3rd party admin group should be able to easily remove the corrupted streaming from their system if they haven’t already.”

As reported by: EGM