Anti-Punkbuster hackers claim responsibility for banned Battlefield 3 PC users

A group of hackers have claimed responsibility for numerous Battlefield 3 PC players being banned in order to show EA how much the group loathes the anti-cheat service Punkbuster.

According to a report on Kotaku, one of those "framing" innocent PC players posted a notice of intent on the Artificial Aiming forums, and posted screenshots of their handy work which applied to BF3 servers tied into GGC-Stream.

The poster claimed that over 150 players had been affected so far.

"We are bringing back the unerring of punkbuster back for a 3rd season," user  anonpbspoofer posted on the AA forums. "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."

It's worth noting the alleged hacking was not coordinated by Artificial Aiming nor was the measure backed by the site either. One of AA's moderators, Doober, has posted a note, saying the supposed hacks have "nothing to do with AA," as the poster " is a junior member here."

Only PC users have been affected, as Punkbuster hasn't been implemented into the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the shooter.

Meanwhile, EA has said it is aware of "connection issues with PunkBuster enabled servers," and at present is "limited to a small subset of players on PC."

"We are actively looking into the specifics of this issue and we are confident that we will have a permanent solution in place shortly," a spokesperson told Kotaku. "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."