Our good bud the Colonel over at stomped has posted a new article about how PunkBuster can be used for evil. The Colonel is right on in this one:
Approximately three months back, PunkBuster was suffering from several security holes that would allow cheaters to use GL cheats and not be detected by PB. Beeraso, acting as a responsible server and league administrator, took on the responsibility to test the allegations before he takes action in his own domain. He downloaded the aforementioned hacks, installed them, and entered a random public server void of players. He then confirmed, in an empty server, the allegations were incorrect and quickly left the server. Throughout his testing phase, the server remained empty and no damage was done.Get your ass in the know, home boys.
I wanted to confirm this situation even further, so I went to Tony Ray, the lead programmer for PunkBuster. In his own words: "Four months ago was around the end of March. During that time period, we were in the process of shifting our code base from to newly written code to take advantage of the recent HL Client update. There were several problems during this transition. However, none of the problems affected actual cheat detection." So technically, there were slight problems that would have created lapses in detection, but overall the system was sound. Although the rumours were rampant, the concern was completely unfounded to a certain extent.