Black Ops 7 Season 04 limits PCs that fail remote attestation

A PC that cannot prove its security settings to Microsoft's servers now gets a much smaller Call of Duty. Team RICOCHET, the anti-cheat team of Activision, announced on June 4, 2026, that Season 04 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 requires modern PC security standards to access competitive playlists, checked through a process it calls Remote Attestation. Players who fail it are moved to a separate matchmaking pool and limited to two playlists: Nuketown 24/7 in Black Ops 7 and Battle Royale Casual in Call of Duty: Warzone.

The same update reports how the team's campaign against two input devices, the Cronus Zen and the XIM Matrix, has gone since it began, and gives one figure: nearly two-thirds of the players temporarily banned for using them changed their behavior after the ban, according to Activision.

The requirement is the third step of a plan the team has laid out season by season since February. Each step has been announced in a RICOCHET update on the official Call of Duty blog, one for each season.

What Remote Attestation checks

Attestation is a way for a computer to prove its state to someone else. In this case, it is the PC proving to the game that two security features are switched on. The first is TPM 2.0, the Trusted Platform Module, a security component built into modern PCs that stores cryptographic keys and can vouch for how the machine started. The second is Secure Boot, a feature of a PC's firmware that only lets trusted software load when the machine starts.

What the Season 04 update stresses is where the check happens. According to the team, Remote Attestation verifies these settings directly with Microsoft, through trusted Microsoft servers, instead of relying only on checks run on the player's own PC, which the update says can be manipulated. The service involved is Microsoft Azure Attestation, which the team abbreviates MAA: a PC that fails its checks is the one moved to the separate pool.

The requirement itself is short. Activision lists two items: TPM 2.0 enabled, and Secure Boot enabled.

How the plan was built over three seasons

The team did not switch the rule on in one go. It first used the cloud check for one mode, then warned players, then enforced it.

The February update, published on February 2, said the cloud check would run before a Ranked Play match begins and would add to the TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot requirements the game already had. Ranked Play is the competitive mode in which players gain or lose a rank from their results. The team wrote then that most players would not need to change any settings, and it pointed to a tool it calls the Secure Attestation Wizard, which checks a PC's configuration and explains what to adjust. Ranked Play was chosen as the first mode for the cloud check. The same update said that RICOCHET's protections had kept the vast majority of Black Ops 7 and Warzone matches free of cheaters since the game's launch, without giving a percentage.

The April update, published on April 2, set its aim as making matches harder for bad actors to reach and keeping them decided by skill. It described the same system as making it harder for cheaters to submit false information about their machines. It added the notices for players who did not meet the requirements, telling them that leaving the features off would soon limit their access to playlists.

What changes for a player who fails

The Season 04 update sets out what happens to a PC that does not pass. The player sees a notice of a Failed Attestation Status, and their matchmaking access is adjusted.

The party rule matters for groups. If a player joins friends and at least one of them is on a PC that is not compliant, the team says the player receives a message that attestation failed because one member of the party did not meet the requirements.

The choice of two playlists is explained in the update. The team writes that the pool of players who have not passed is small, so it limits them to a select set of playlists to keep matchmaking healthy.

"This requirement helps protect the integrity of the game and the experience of the broader community," the team writes of the Season 04 rule. The update gives no figure for how many PC players are in the separate pool.

When the failure is not the player's fault

The update also deals with a practical problem. Some PCs can fail the check because of their firmware, according to the team.

The BIOS is the firmware that starts a PC before the operating system loads. For failures of this kind, the team says it will keep helping to identify and escalate the cases, but that the fixes ultimately come from the manufacturers.

The input device campaign

The second half of the update is about a different kind of cheating: devices that modify a player's inputs, which Activision calls scripted input devices. It names two, the Cronus Zen and the XIM Matrix.

Its position has been the same since February. "Unapproved third-party devices like Cronus Zen and XIM Matrix have no place in Call of Duty," the Season 02 update said. That update called the devices cheating tools even when they are marketed for accessibility, said they break Activision's Security and Enforcement Policy, and said the game offers its own in-game options and supported hardware for players with accessibility needs. It described the detection approach in general terms: the system looks at how inputs behave, their timing, consistency and response patterns, and targets classes of machine-driven behavior rather than a single signature, because the devices are highly configurable. The behaviors it named were recoil control, aim behavior and input precision beyond what a standard controller or mouse can physically achieve. Season 02 targeted the most widely used configurations as a starting point, and the team said it would keep building detections until these devices no longer work in Call of Duty.

The April update said the detections were being expanded, acknowledged that some of these devices are marketed with accessibility claims, and repeated that enforcement depends on how a device is used to gain an unfair advantage. The Season 04 update says the team keeps updating its systems to identify gameplay behavior that goes beyond normal human abilities.

Enforcement came in phases. According to the June update, it started with player education through warnings before escalating to bans, and the team notes that these devices are sold through mainstream retailers. It reports that nearly two-thirds of the players temporarily banned for using them changed their behavior after enforcement. The update gives no total of bans and no count of players involved.

Accounts and what comes next

The attestation rule is one of several measures aimed at the same target: making it harder for banned cheaters to come back. In April, the team introduced two-factor authentication by text message for free-to-play PC players who do not own a Call of Duty title released in the last two years, starting with new PC accounts and extending to existing ones over the following weeks. Two-factor authentication asks for a second proof of identity, here a code sent to a phone, on top of the password. The check is made separately for each linked platform account: the team's own example is that owning Black Ops 7 on one PC platform does not exempt a player who runs Warzone through Steam. Players may also be asked to verify their identity again later. The team said the goal was to make it harder for banned cheaters to return on new accounts and to shrink the pool of accounts used for cheating and account fraud.

For Season 04, the update says the input device detections will keep evolving through the season and beyond. Between seasonal updates, the team points players to its official accounts on X and to upcoming Progress Reports for news of its work. It sets no date for any further change to the attestation rule, and it describes matchmaking in the public game only: it says nothing about the Call of Duty League or other organized competitions.

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