It seriously isn't. Effectively you can not ban cheating. A cheater can just use virtual or modified hardware keyboards, displays and mice to cheat. How is a kernel extension going to prevent that? That is the logical next step, which is already being done by some (currently less than alpha). Once we reach this state as a default, nothing can prevent cheating, besides a real tournament with checked hardware. All the effort riot is currently putting into this will be for nothing. I do not understand, how they are missing that.
You can raise the cost of cheating so that cheating kids will get annoyed and go cheat in some other game or scroll TikTok or whatever. We're not exactly dealing with nation-states here.
"Bored kids" is a pretty naive idea of cheating in PvP games. There's custom hardware for it, and a surprisingly large amount of people spend more than $1k/mo just to cheat in video games.
Grow up, you cannot honestly think that government employees in Russian and China dont have more important things to deal with than ruining western teenage gamers experience with state funded cheat codes and hacks.
That's the thing with psyops and "plausible deniability" stuff. Do too much of it and eventually you'll be blamed for everything that's gone bad no matter if you actually did it or not. China and Russia are in the "FO" phase of "FAFO".
Besides, sowing discontent is a tried and true propaganda strategy.
I'm sorry, but no posts above make any sense, which is obvious to anyone with any degree of familiarity with chinese/russian/brazilian/german/british/north american cheating demographic and communities (yes that's a thing, also note how those two are only 1/3 of the worst offenders, and the poster above clearly doesn't have any idea about it). Stop the nationalistic flamebait and FUD, please.
Everyone cheats, I think no one here is seriously arguing that, no matter the country.
The question is: who coughs up the money for developing these cheats? Some of these, particularly the PCIe hardware rootkits, take a lot of money, time and skilled people to develop - and it is not too far fetched to assume that a nation state has been of assistance here.
Others openly flout their allegiance to Russia like the MIG-Switch developers, a ton of "bulletproof hosters" use Russian ASNs and/or are based in Russia, malware automatically disables itself when it detects indications of being in Russia... I can explain the latter away as "don't shit where you eat", but the others? There's no way there aren't direct links between the Russian government and the criminal actors. At the very least there must be some sort of "tacit approval".
I know that I'm repeating myself but none of that has any connection to reality for anyone remotely familiar with the devs of specific cheats and their history. Especially DMA hardware developers which are neither Russian nor Chinese. I can write a long post about this some day (especially about how local online game hacking economy/culture works, for every cultural bubble - they overlap a lot, and specific moments of drama inside them) and post it to HN, but please, stop being a part of the "psyop" you're talking about.
That wasn't my point though. My point was to offer an explanation why everyone is so quick to blame Russian and Chinese propaganda these days - I call it "inverse yell fire" or "inverse crying wolf": both countries have so often denied any involvement or responsibility in clear and serious violations that now everyone defaults to not believing their denials.
It could be a good infection vector. I’m under the impression that these programs are generally distributed on shady sites, need low-level access and high permissions, and are generally (actually, not sure about this part) proprietary and closed source. So, release some good cheats, and see if anybody important downloads one.
Government officials and security researchers play videogames too, after all… sure, we’d hope they’d have good computer self defense. But it is a fishing expedition and all that.
In all fairness, anti-cheat is like a lock. No lock will prevent a determined thief from just breaking your window, but the point is to keep out the majority of "easy thieves". For them the goal isn't the be perfect but to not be the easy target.
Now is a kerbal level anti-cheat overkill? Hard to say from the outside but it does seem like installing a steel vault for your door. While the window is still right there as normal.
Cheaters currently use entirely second PCs, or other extremely complicated methods of cheating, and are still getting caught.
Security isn't "for nothing", you make it as expensive as possible for cheaters/adversaries to win, and then keep raising the bar, to make the majority of users safe and secure.
CS2 is entirely unplayable now due to hackers. I’m told Valorant isn’t much better. There’s probably just no solution unless you design your game to not benefit from hacking (e.g. Hearthstone, MTG)
That is what you use behavior detection for. If you don't give human like inputs from the cheat it is detectable and if you limit yourself to what a human can do then the cheat is not very desirable.
> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”
But if you read the article they do have some way to detect (some) DMA based hacks too where the actual cheat runs on a different computer and use DMA through a pci-express card to read/write directly into memory.
> “I think we detect the majority of it today, but it’s kind of iterative,” said Koskinas.
Though most cheaters "rage cheating" after losing really badly and using cheats to "get back" and those are much easier to detects. This kind of "download random cheat from the internet" at the best only get you banned and at worst your computer is super duper hacked (you are effectively manually downloading a virus and manually giving it admin/kernel level access)
> Thanks to all these techniques and strategies, most cheaters can now be roughly divided into two categories. The first, representing the majority of cheaters, is made up by those who are “rage cheating” by using cheap tools that are easy to detect. Riot employees sarcastically call these cheats “download-a-ban,” according to Koskinas.
At the end of the day all I know from my own experience is that the difference in the amount of cheaters I run into between Counter Strike and Valorant is massive and the main claimed difference being kernel level stuff in Valorants anti cheat (or Valve is just really really bad at making anti cheats)
Valve surprised me 1-3 years ago. I had a compromised password because my steam account was created in my youth and has not been used since.
Someone figured it out and used my account to cheat in counter strike. Valve banned the account one week (!!) later. Now the account can not be used to play their competitive games anymore. Needlessly to say it was a lifetime ban.
To this day I keep wondering how they can fk this up so bad.
Why I am even allowed to play CS without 2fa enabled and without Email confirmation for the first login? They also failed to block the login from Thailand despite it's creation in Germany. This could have been so easily prevented.
Not sure if they fixed this yet. Otherwise you have your answer, why there so many more cheaters. It is not just the kernel extension. The most basics are not in place.
> To this day I keep wondering how they can fk this up so bad. Why I am even allowed to play CS without 2fa enabled and without Email confirmation for the first login? They also failed to block the login from Thailand despite it's creation in Germany. This could have been so easily prevented.
This is because any barrier to playing the game is also effectively a barrier for someone to buying their lootbox crap.
