←back to thread

We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

(mobeigi.com)
379 points mobeigi | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 18:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.231s | source
Show context
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.

replies(2): >>41862854 #>>41865147 #
BlueTemplar ◴[17 Oct 24 00:03 UTC] No.41865147[source]▶
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 !

replies(6): >>41865188 #>>41865819 #>>41867305 #>>41867790 #>>41868755 #>>41871938 #
1. RALaBarge ◴[17 Oct 24 11:52 UTC] No.41868755[source]▶
No, that figure is way off. Check out a website that sells digital goods or cheats and you will see that even far smaller games have cheats available.

Escape from Tarkov comes to mind. An extremely hard and niche first person shooter with RPG elements. It is a private Russian company so we don't know exact player numbers, but it is estimated to be ~200k by some hits in a google search.

There are people who will provide carry services and guns and gear for plenty of people who will pay for it, as well as other providers selling the cheats that the carriers use for a weekly fee. The people who are providing these services are getting paid in USD when their local currency has a far lower value. It isn't a moral thing, it is a money thing.

You know that you sometimes don't know a bug exists before someone exploits it or uses your software in a way that you did not think of. There are experts who stand to make tons of cash if they can create or use an exploit that people will pay money to advance with.

The only way to prevent this is something that no one wants to hear, but it needs to be a unique citizenship identifier of some sort, since HWIDs and other means of tracking are mostly useless.