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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

(mobeigi.com)
379 points mobeigi | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 18:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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LinuxAmbulance ◴[16 Oct 24 19:16 UTC] No.41862747[source]▶
Excellent write up and solution. Cheating in video games makes for a wretched experience for those who don't cheat.

It's crazy how rampant cheating in multiplayer games, especially competitive ones has gotten. Ten years ago, I thought it was at an extreme, but it's only gone up since then.

Part of the problem is that for some software developers, writing cheats brings in a massive amount of money.

So instead of some teenager messing around making unsophisticated cheats, you have some devs that are far better at writing cheats than game developers are at preventing them.

It doesn't help that game devs have to secure everything, everywhere, but cheat devs only have to find a single flaw.

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DJBunnies ◴[16 Oct 24 19:26 UTC] No.41862854[source]▶
I think a better question here is: why is game code so exploitable?

A: laziness and cost. It just doesn’t matter the same way that baking code matters, I guess.

So they toss on some cheap anti cheat instead of architecting it safely (expensively.)

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1. GuB-42 ◴[16 Oct 24 19:55 UTC] No.41863154[source]▶
Priorities. Games need content and performance. Give game developers more budget, and they will work on making the game faster, fix game breaking bugs, and add content rather than make the game less exploitable.

And cheats do not always rely on exploitable bugs. A bot using screen capture and input device emulation works at the OS level and in other contexts (ex: accessibility), it would be a legitimate thing to do.