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.

Some competitive multiplayer games.

Which seem to be exclusively FPS games with ~10+M players ?

I don't even remember the last time when I've heard of a game outside that very narrow (albeit decently popular) category to have complaints about cheaters. Meanwhile for these games, I hear about it like every month, and all this despite this genre being amongst the ones that I play the least !

One thing to note is that CSGO can be considered a play-to-earn type game; you play the game, get lootboxes, get lucky, sell the item for... idk, hundreds? thousands? So it's an incentive to cheat and buy new copies of the game if found out. A single item can be a month's income easily.

Mind you I don't know if that's the case on privately hosted servers as well, since those could be manipulated to give players the points needed to get the lootboxes.