Last week, a hacker boasted that he had banned more than 150 innocent Battlefield 3 users to protest the game's inclusion of PunkBuster anti-cheat software. Now, EA has announced via Battlelog that they've begun working with Punkbuster to reverse the fraudulent bans and help prevent future attacks.
"Together with the 3rd party service providers we have taken steps to remove the faulty bans, and improve the protection against future fake bans," the statement reads.
"We have determined that the root cause resulting in the server bans is not directly related to Battlefield 3, but rather related to select 3rd party services which server owners can use in conjunction with PunkBuster to protect their servers."
The third-party service in question is GGC-Stream, a network that allows servers to subscribe to a global PunkBuster banlist. By spoofing a PunkBuster ban on a single GGC member server, the attackers were able to send it to thousands of servers around the world.
The nature of the exploit means that only PC users were affected, and only when attempting to connect to a specific group of servers. If you're still encountering trouble, just hold tight, as EA says they're still investigating the issue and working with server operators to get everything back to normal.
In an interesting twist, Battlefield 3 developer DICE has also put out a new job listing for an Anti Cheat Administrator, though it's unclear whether this is a direct response to the recent attack or something the studio had been planning prior.
