Valve Software Battles Video-game Cheaters

We've done some work in this space (probably less than the other high-end security consultancies). It's an extremely fun problem. It's also a flip side to the DRM/content protection problem. If you believe DRM can't work, you can't believe that it's possible to run a secure game client either.<p>You might be surprised how many dinky Flash games have variants of this problem, and the sophistication that web developers have to develop to create even rudimentary defenses to attacks on leaderboards and prize claims.<p>For what it's worth: I'm on DRM's side of this problem, from a CS perspective. Over the long run, I think the content protection people are going to win.

Whether or not Valve Anti-Cheat System works, I believe its existence has reduced the number of players who assume every good player is hacking. In the old days (0.6 maybe?), chat was filled with hack accusations on death. These days, it seems like it is said less frequently, and mostly in jest.<p>Then again, sometimes it is very hard to tell if someone is wallhacking or just good/lucky, so I could just have a false sense of security on the issue. However, this sense (false or not) is enough to eliminate any frustration on death and just assume I need to get better.

Very interesting read. Fighting game cheats has always been difficult and it's fascinating to see how far both cheating and anti-cheating techniques have come in all this time.<p>I must admit it was also especially gratifying to read that someone finally acknowledge the following truth:<p><i>Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy.</i>

PC game hacks are not going anywhere. It's simply too much of an open system.<p>Currently, Valve's VAC and Blizzard's Warden suffer from the problem of fingerprinting. If you're competent enough with C/C++ and assembly, and are careful with your hooking, you can easily create working hacks with little fear of being caught.<p>As gaming moves more towards consoles, you'll see less and less cheating, as the barrier to entry is quite a bit higher.

They have been doing this since 2004 and is somewhat unsuccessful as a lot of the real "cheaters" steal steam accounts to abuse. Although to some companies piracy is bad, for Valve it is not as they have Steam. There is no real way around getting into servers without having Steam installed unless you want to play strictly with cheaters.

Obtaining working free wallhacks/aimbots for most games is pretty easy.<p>Right now I can only remember <a href="http://www.mpcforum.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mpcforum.com/</a> .<p>I "tested" one of their aimbots (on TF2) and not only did it work, but I also did not get banned.