The Fall of Minecraft's 2b2t

2b2t the oldest anarchy server in minecraft has just spent the past four weeks in complete turmoil an infamous group of hackers has been using an exploit against the entire server for the past three years in secret and it's finally been revealed to the public as someone who has covered minecraft exploits for years i can safely say this is the most powerful and destructive one i have ever seen the ultimate coordinate exploit capable of tracking the real-time movements of over three hundred thousand players across all three of minecraft's dimensions fifteen thousand bases were found using this exploit there was nowhere to run or hide it was used to grief countless builds and steal over 200 million minecraft items from stashes the group responsible was thought to have quit the server years ago but they've been pulling the strings from behind the scenes the entire time what's remarkable is that this exploit shows how fundamentally flawed minecraft as a game actually is one person even tried to warn the community that this was happening but they were written off as crazy and no one listened prepare yourselves for today we'll be discussing no com the most powerful exploit in minecraft history explaining who discovered it how it was possible from a technical perspective and the complete and utter destruction it caused this video has been three years in the making and has required months of research and gathering testimony so if you consider hitting that subscribe button you are an absolute legend with that being said let's get started since the server began in 2010 players have always attempted to use exploits in order to gain an advantage over others if you haven't seen my video the day 2b2t almost died i'll sum it up real quick in 2016 a group of players that went by the name nerds incorporated attempted to take over the server through the use of hacking and social engineering they actually succeeded at their plan and had access to admin powers but it was short-lived and they eventually lost them many members of the nerds would go inactive and for a couple of years not much was heard from them until two years later in 2018 two players ox 22 and bubba j were both server regulars that had an interest in minecraft exploits they had recently discovered a way to crash the server by loading a massive amount of chunks at the same time the most simple thing you can do in minecraft is breaking a block and to do this you need to click on it what the exploit did was click on blocks everywhere across the map even if they were out of render distance this forced the server to use an incredible amount of resources attempting to load chunks that had never been visited by players thousands upon thousands of chunks were loaded in a matter of seconds causing incredible amounts of lag and eventually the server would crash instead of abusing this new exploit right away ox and bubba j started theorizing how it could be used to their advantage there was a way that they could turn this crash exploit into a coordinate exploit but they needed the proper conditions first you see the majority of multiplayer servers in the java edition of minecraft run something called paper mc which fixes bugs and makes the game more stable occasionally though a bug fix can lead to a vulnerability that can be exploited to someone's advantage any time there was a server breaking exploit to b2t's admin house master would have to report the issue to paper mc if they could crash the server to produce a specific out-of-memory message to house he would report the bug the most obvious fix to this would be to have chunks only respond to the server if they were loaded by a player which could reveal someone's location it was genius the two shared their plan with a close friend named frickin who was a member of nerds incorporated the same group that tried to take over the server in 2016. he confirmed that their plan could work if paper developers were to implement the obvious fix and so they set their plan into motion in july of 2018 they would begin crashing the server as fast and hard as they could making it unplayable each crash would notify house that players were attempting to click blocks out of render distance and it was causing the server to go haywire he reportedly issued a paper on july 12th and later the very same day the exact bug fix the group was hoping for was implemented when attempting to click blocks out of render distance the server would only give a response if a chunk was loaded by a player they now had the proper conditions for their coordinate exploit and the following day july 13th they had their first working version but it was very primitive they would keep an afk account in the overworld and it would attempt to click blocks in all chunks leading away from spawn in a spiral pattern if a chunk responded it would send the coordinates privately in chat any chunks that gave a response were then charted on a graph bubba j would begin using the exploit to find and destroy item stashes which started a panic in the community wanting to keep the exploit as low profile as possible fricken suggested a name for it no com short for no comment this way if the exploit name was somehow leaked it wouldn't raise any red flags as a member of nerds incorporated fricken told the others in the group about the exploit and they were brought into the circle of trust in august of 2018 i released a video discussing the crash exploit that had already been patched but while doing research for that video i asked bubba j if he knew anything about the exploit he replied with no comment little did i know at the time he was actually telling me the name of the exploit it was hiding in plain sight and we were all oblivious to it in the following months the primitive version of the exploit would prove to be tedious it was slow resource intensive and there was no easy way to differentiate between actual bases and simple dirt huts in most cases the charted chunks were just empty wilderness there was also no easy way to tell which specific player was in the loaded chunks they needed some sort of automation enter ledger a talented programmer and the lead developer of baritone a program that automated actions in minecraft legere had legitimate experience with machine learning so the nerds requested his help in making the exploit more powerful he accepted the challenge and was brought into the circle of trust over the next few months his contributions would change everything the first order of business was making searches more efficient a program was taught to follow players once it identified them they were located by running checks all the way up and down to b2t's major highways and then followed them to wherever they were going instead of searching in a spiral pattern starting at spawn an adaptive tracking system would predict where players were headed the easiest way to describe this exploit is like a game of battleship and the enemy ships are players on the server you can't actually see where they are and no matter what spot you choose to fire on your opponent must tell you whether you hit a ship or you've missed on 2b2t your opponent is the server itself and instead of firing missiles you're trying to click blocks in chunks that you can't see the server has to tell you whether a chunk you clicked on was loaded or not loaded after it learned to track players the program would use probability association to identify them it would notice when specific accounts were connecting and disconnecting from the server if a trail of chunks was suddenly unloaded at the same time someone disconnected it began to associate that username with the chunk trail so after two or three disconnects it had a clear idea of who was actually in those chunks this also allowed the program to chart how far a player had gone in a specific session of minecraft by this point afk accounts were being used in all three dimensions so all player movements were being tracked legere shared with me how the math behind the adaptive tracking system works for this video and as you can see it's as easy as one two three from there the program was taught to search all incoming chunk information for unnatural blocks such as shulkers stained glass beacons multiple chests etc if these blocks were found the program would then recreate the chunks in a separate instance of minecraft what you are looking at is an actual 2b2t base being reconstructed in real time the program has identified these chunks as a legitimate base it's taking the block information and comparing it to what should be there on 2b2tc which is publicly known after running the check it then displays what is different once the process is complete the world download is automatically stored on a separate database this feature effectively gave the nerds a form of spectator mode and allowed them to see what was happening in any loaded chunks on the server here you can see an after the fact visualization made from years old data collected on the average base this one is named electric boogaloo you can see how it starts from nothing just a few random checks per chunk then it grabs and explores areas that are likely to be part of the build it even goes back and rechecks sections periodically to see if any changes have been made with all of these adaptive programming changes legere would combine them with the nerd's original exploit what happened next was nothing short of incredible the no com exploit was now the most powerful in minecraft history they were visually tracking every single player movement on the entire server in real time at one second intervals every chunk trail base location and player log out spot was now compromised heat maps allowed them to see where the most player activity was happening at all times they would acquire so much data using this exploit that everything i've mentioned so far is just the tip of the iceberg it was the ultimate power and the nerds had to show an incredible amount of restraint in using it because it was possible due to a paper vulnerability this meant that the exploit could work on other servers as well there was truly nowhere to hide the exploit had to be kept a secret and to do that the group would have to feed the community false information for years to keep them from finding out the truth anytime there was evidence of a coordinate exploit being used on the server the nerds would brush it off as paranoia or make up a different exploit with enough believability that people would buy it what they were effectively doing was gaslighting in the english language one way to describe gaslighting is convincing a person that their memories of an event are not accurate for example let's say that when you were a young child your parents took you to an amusement park and while there they gave you a red balloon if i wanted to gaslight you i would say your balloon wasn't red it was green don't you remember now this is an obvious lie but if i repeat this statement to you enough times you might start to believe that you were misremembering that your balloon was actually green this strategy of making people question their own realities is what the nerds have been doing to the community for years several of my previous videos involving coordinate exploits had explanations such as tracking ender pearl teleportations or triangulating a base by observing a pet teleporting the reality was that while these methods were actual exploits they were used as a cover for the no no-com exploit which was the true method all along having believable explanations for bases and stashes being found was crucial in 2019 the nerds would start utilizing their exploit more and more their use of it would lead to the leaking or griefing of many prominent bases on the server such as space vault 3 the ice dragon at niflheim the great tree and many more sometimes they would just leak the coordinates out outright and let aspiring griefers take care of the rest the nerds began a campaign called dipper nation and used memes to troll the community about the true nature of the exploit what's funny is that in their base league screenshots they did not actually visit those places in person they were using remote viewing to see what the base looked like they could doom entire builds without even lifting a finger it seemed like the group was unstoppable but in the later part of 2019 they would hit a major roadblock biblebot one of the afk accounts that had been used to obtain chunk information was locked by mojang due to suspicious activity involving the authentication servers around this time housemaster would also lower the server's packet limit by a substantial amount this meant it was no longer possible to use the exploit by only having a single account logged in multiple afk accounts would have to be used in order to maintain the rate at which data was pulled from the server ledger would also have to retool his machine learning program to overcome these limits after a few months of downtime the exploit was back up and running more efficiently than ever but realizing that more data limits could effectively shut them down they decided that showing restraint in using the exploit was no longer an option of the group members ox 22 bubba j and ledger were all members of a separate organization called the spawn masons who had become well known on the server for many of their ambitious projects the three began taking large amounts of stash coordinates from the no com database and began providing them to the masons with no questions asked a subgroup of the masons led by a player named dectonic would scout out each stash for useful building blocks and decide whether to give it up to the group to steal or destroy it over the course of 2020 the group would steal from and then destroy hundreds of stashes around the server they did this so that the group would have more resources at its disposal in total the masons would acquire more than 200 million minecraft items from these stashes it was clear that anyone able to use the no comm exploit had a major advantage over everyone else while the exploit was running flawlessly and house was still unaware of the original vulnerability someone began to notice that something was not right a player named zero neb realized that there were at least four accounts logged into the server 24 7. being able to stay online without getting afk kicked is very hard so multiple accounts doing it instantly raised a red flag zero neb began to suspect that the accounts were being used for an exploit of some kind and he started inquiring about it his original messages to the nerds had been ignored but upon mentioning the afk accounts he was surprised to see them respond they dismissed his claim as paranoia and that he was being ridiculous zero neb would attempt to bring these findings to the attention of the greater community but he was either ignored or laughed at the nerds would actually program one of their afk accounts to randomly message nev with random strings of morse code from time to time fueling his paranoia to all-time highs the nerds would spend the rest of 2020 trolling zero neb raiding stashes and continuing to expand their database of locations but in 2021 another group of 2b2t players would stumble upon the original paper vulnerability enter steve iii mahan and red stoner three associates of a group called the infinity incursion they had developed a brute force version of the exploit but far more primitive at first they used it to observe the highways but after some optimizations they were able to find base and stash coordinates just like the nerds could but when it came to tracking players real-time movements they could only follow one person at a time instead of the hundreds that the nerds could now with the ability to only follow one person at a time i want you to take a guess as to who they decided to track to absolutely no one's surprise it was me in may of 2021 i was base hunting on my sunday morning live streams i'd been using an alt account and at the time had not logged into my main account fit for quite a while i'm usually pretty good at concealing my location but somehow i was getting found every single week which was highly unusual while stream snipes have happened in the past they're pretty uncommon occurrences and are usually complete accidents but to keep getting found every single week despite being hundreds of thousands of blocks away from spawn i knew an exploit was being used sure enough the stream snipers revealed that they had been tracking me using their exploit they knew exactly where my account was at all times i even caught one of them attempting to sell the coordinates of my logout spot for real-world money at this point i knew that my main account was not safe to log in with which is why at the time of me making this video i haven't logged into it for over four months in early june the exploit was starting to go public with more groups starting to gain access to it throughout all of june and july bases and stashes began to fall the server was going into doomsday mode with players afraid to even log in out of fear of their bases being blown up but it was too late fifteen thousand locations had already been compromised regardless of who was online or not it was during this chaos that i was finally shown the true power of the exploit if you saw my previous video you already know that 10 of us joined forces to grief a base belonging to a player named beardler after the grief took place i actually received a message from ox 22 he had tracked my alt and the accounts of everyone else to the staging area a few days before the grie since beardler had been tracked to that very same location months previously they already knew why we were there by using remote viewing the nerds were able to see the tnt being placed on the actual builds without even speaking to any of them they knew our plan it was possible to use the exploit to predict events before they actually happened i was stunned i knew the exploit was powerful but not that powerful by this point the community had reached the breaking point with many emailing house to warn him about the original paper mc vulnerability the masons knew that the exploit was going to end so they went on one final killing spree hunting every new player its spawn they could find finally on july 15 2021 exactly three years after the original exploit was created house implemented a range limit that effectively destroyed it accounts were no longer capable of being tracked and the server would not give information about faraway chunks but the damage had been done the exploit had left a trail of destruction spanning multiple years across the entire server zero neb who had been written off as crazy was actually right all along he had warned the community but no one had listened the total amount of data that the nerds had collected on the entire server was well over two terabytes the majority of the base and stash locations over fifteen thousand were still located on their private server just like during the 2016 backdoor drama they were the ones pulling the strings from behind the scenes all along they never truly quit as someone who has played minecraft for over 11 years the fallout of this exploit has given me a unique perspective the reason the title of this video is called the fall of minecraft's 2b2t is because the server that we've played on all these years the one that was compromised by the nerds has finally fallen with the exploit patched a new 2b2t can rise from the ashes while the destruction on the server is going to get a lot worse before it gets better we can now travel in peace knowing we aren't being tracked by the all-seeing eye in the sky everything that happens here is driven by real players with real motives for a group of notorious hackers to socially engineer a server admin to open up a vulnerability and using machine learning to create the most powerful exploit in minecraft history is not a story you can write it's as real as it gets and that is why there is no other place in minecraft like 2b2t we've always been playing a completely different game the moral of today's story no comment the question now is what happens next that was a long video so if you enjoyed you better be hitting that like and subscribe button also make sure to follow my socials so take it easy fit fam and you can finally breathe easy

Channel: FitMC

Views: 2,716,375

Rating: 4.9582424 out of 5

Keywords: minecraft, history, update, mobs, creeper, raid, nether, sea, monster, dragon, red, 2b2t, anarchy, server, fitmc, fit, oldest, builds, tour, battle, spawn, grief, hack, client, incursion, tutorial, dream, herobrine, hacked, exploit, glitch, mojang, flying, redstone, technoblade, smp, live, campfire, blast, furnace, parody, song, memes, house, piglin, hoglin, forest, 1.17, bastion, respawn, anchor, pvp, popbob, remnant, chests, chest, animation, speedrun, duplication, bed, minecon, mc, unsolved, mystery, end, caves, cliffs, warden, beast, mrbeast, fotmc, tb2t

Id: elqAh3GWRpA

Length: 23min 54sec (1434 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/FrostDeezAKA]

Just read the documentation in the link he has pinned and so far it all seems plausible. Fit takes information and places it into a context that adds the unbelieveable angle. So i wouldnt say he exaggerates, but dramatizes scenarios.

The information on its own, in this situation though, doesnt need any added context. I could give af about popbob or whoever is "pulling the strings behind the server," but the actual exploit is interesting enough on its own.

Tl;dr yeah it seems real and you all have been living in someones simulation where they were actually playing god for the past few years.

[u/3e2j]

Theres alot of talk like how "the nerds are behind it!" showing popbob and iTristan (bruh moment), honestly theres some aspect of drama added into the videos he produces so take some things with a grain of salt. The exploit itself though was definitely real and was used to reveal thousands of bases off player locations. Fit has known to be a drama-esc-youtuber for the views and stuff, so yeah; but all-in-all, the exploit did happen.

[u/HowardPlayzOfAdmin]

As the video resource has the explanations, the exploit came from the Nerds Inc back in 2018. Then, in 2020, the Spawnmason team griefed a base full of dupe stashes. 0neb is the one who found out something not right. Watch and open the link of the video in the pinned comment.

[u/CHAD_J_THUNDERCOCK]

/u/0N3B your post is at 16:59 . Its nuts seeing how they automated gaslighting of you

[u/ARandomBirdWithWifi]

btw does anyone know the guy who tried to warn people? I want to see if he has made any posts about him being right and stuff

[u/Generaallucas]

0:35 THAT'S MINE

[u/maksitaxi-on-middle]

i came into this video expecting to be heavily disappointed but was heavily surprised. except for missing a bit on how the exploit was leaked at the end, the entire video is quality and factual.

[u/Creeper4wwMann]

The exploit is def real and was used... The 15.000 bases is probably very inaccurate. What counts as an actual base? A stash? Someone's home? A wooden shack?

I expect big bases and stashes to be found/griefed/leaked but the majority will never be touched unless all coords go public.

All the bs about Nerds being involved should be taken with a grain of salt... It's just 3 guys coding stuff to cause damage.

[u/2b2tAlt]

Exploit is legit, context and drama around it is heavily exaggerated