Roblox is one of the largest games in the world and is very popular among children. However, the gaming platform is repeatedly plagued by hackers. Players were recently banned automatically due to an exploit. The alleged hackers claim they have more attacks planned.
What was the exploit? Roblox is like a giant construction kit where players can create their own game modes and play them with others. The game is extremely successful, had over 150 million monthly active players at times during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is more valuable on the stock market than Activision Blizzard.
However, the servers created by other players also carry certain risks. There was an exploit in chat moderation on some of these servers. The automated moderation was led to believe that the joining player had said terrible things. Consequently, an automatic ban apparently followed.
The developers of Roblox confirmed to PCGamesN that such a problem occurred. Players are encouraged to report malicious content and to initiate an appeal process if they believe they have been banned unjustly.
Hackers and other problems surrounding Roblox are not new. We wrote about this back in early 2022:
Alleged hackers say: “We are doing this just for fun”
Who is behind this exploit? This is not entirely clear. According to the Twitter account Roblox RTC, the owner of the server Crosswinds [A.2] has been permanently banned. He was likely the first user to exploit this.
Also, the popular plugin “Kohl’s Admin” was suspected according to Roblox RTC. However, it turned out that only copies of the plugin used for other servers were involved.
Roblox RTC, however, shared a statement from the Discord user Syntax 64. He claims to be behind the action along with others. They wanted to send a wake-up call to the developers, as the problem has reportedly been known to them for over a year.
However, Roblox’s ignorant behavior leads to the attackers wanting to continue:
Just to be clear: We are not pretending to be noble people helping Roblox continue to be lazy and patch their platform. Personally, I don’t care what happens because I’ve already given up hope for the company as a whole. Right now, we are just here for fun. We don’t care what our actions will have as an impact on partnerships.
How can I protect myself from such attacks or exploits? Generally, you should not trust anyone in Roblox. Especially for children’s accounts, in the “Privacy” section, the option “Who can chat with me” should be set to “Nobody”.
You should also be careful about which servers you play on. It also matters what settings have been made in the account. If the correct age has been entered for children, servers with more violent content will be hidden.
For more on safety, you can find our interview with Laura Higgins, Director of Community Safety and Digital Civility at Roblox Corporation: Roblox has become a large social network for children since COVID – But these dangers lurk.
Even though much in the article sounds like Roblox has some problems, the game remains very popular among children and offers many possibilities. How parents should best deal with the topic was explained by our former author Andreas Bertits in his article from 2019:
“Dad, I want more Robux!” – How I get along with my gamer kids
