We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

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.

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.)

It’s not that simple.

Some games aren’t able to prevent cheating. The client has the data on where the enemies on their screen are. The cheat only needs to move the mouse and click on the enemies heads. Other games like MMORPGs involve the cheat just playing the game and farming on behalf of the player.

It just becomes a cat and mouse game where the anti cheat is trying to detect something hooking into the game process while the cheat tries to hide itself.