Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sends a memory dump, which could contain the player's credentials (or fragments thereof) in plaintext.
Just four return addresses on the stack.
Oh, I thought it was just 32 contiguous bytes fished from the stack.
How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
131–140 of 148 posts
Re: How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
#132> and we refer to it as shellcode8kb
Who is "we" in this context? Is there a community of anti-cheat reverse engineers out there?
Re: How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
#133Serious question for you gamers out there: Why would a person go to such great lengths to cheat at a video game? Is there a monetary incentive? Otherwise, it seems like a lot of effort just to increase one's standing on a leader board.
With the rise of esports there is a lot of money to be made with no real consequences. It isn't illegal to essentially steal prize money by cheating at a video game. Also game streaming is big now and being "good" attracts more viewers so there is also a lot of money to be made by cheating. I have completely stopped taking video games seriously in any capacity as I am pretty confident the entire culture of competitiv…
DIOL (Do It On LAN) has been an acronym in online games for a couple of decades now, for good reason.
Though I've heard now it's possible to load your USB peripherals with cheating software.
https://hackaday.com/2017/07/29/injecting-code-into-mouse-fi...
Re: How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
#134Serious question for you gamers out there: Why would a person go to such great lengths to cheat at a video game? Is there a monetary incentive? Otherwise, it seems like a lot of effort just to increase one's standing on a leader board.
There are different kinds of cheaters. Some like the rush of doing something "naughty". Some want quick results. Some want prestige. Some want to explore and exploit the system itself rather than the game. Some want to gold farm. Some want to be like gods. Some want to automate the tedious parts. Some want to take down big mobs that can't be taken down any other way. I once wrote about 400k of Blech code for Macroque…
There's some overlap with your points but I think you missed 2 big ones.
Blatant cheating to troll is one (myg0t "clan" is the first notorious case I remember from back in the day).
Another is "cheating" to fix problems in the game. Some games are really good except for a couple of issues. An example from back in the day is Final Fantasy XI. They programmed it so ALT-TAB would crash the game. They thought this would stop cheaters (Japanese devs don't seem to really get the PC landscape sometimes) but it was just really inconvenient for the rest of us. I hit it by mistake/habit more than once in a tense moment. So a third party hack called Windower was invented to stop this.
Predictably, it was very popular but there were also players saying those who used it were dirty cheats who deserved a ban. Alsod predictably, because it already operated in a grey area, it received a number of QoL updates and features including add-on support and scripting where anyone could easily develop things that clearly crosses the line.
Re: How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
#135How long until you can point another computer at your game pc or console, to play for you? That’s game over for anti-cheat IMO.
For informational cheats I think we already have proxies that we can tunnel the packets through and get all the details up on a second screen (if you really want to keep your game PC pristine).
For many games packet inspection and injection work just fine to automate actions and provide access to hidden information.
Re: How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The golden rule doesn't apply, because none of the cheaters would complain that there are also other cheaters cheating.
The golden rule always applies. There are not exceptions in criminal law for people who want specific crimes committed against them (ie sexual assault). To further argue the point: if all players were cheating then there would be no competitive advantage to cheating, which eliminates the only reason a subset of players cheat in the first place. Even by skewed standards it violates the golden rule.
Do you know what "the golden rule" says? Literally, "as you would have them do". The cheaters really don't care that other people also cheat. That is, they cheat and they would have others cheat too. That is a totally logical position. You'll need to expectorate some other hoary old maxim to support your cantankerous old argument.
Re: How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the topic of the article is cheaters that compete with other players. Anti-cheats are not really necessary for games where the only person being cheated is the cheater. I also excluded professional players because the original poster was basically trying to get an answer regarding what kind of person would cheat when there was no extra incentive. Obviously, professional players or players in any games that of…
Anti-cheat is still a major issue on multiplayer games that are not PVP-centric, like MMOs. In these cases, the negative externalities of cheating are more like a tragedy of commons than griefing. Cheaters and bots screw up the economy and increase competition for training / farming areas, but generally only in aggregate. Much easier to justify than directly ruining someones experience by killing them instantly every…
This extends even as far as Chinese dress-up MMOs like Love Nikki where people will use bots to vote randomly in competitions because there are substantial rewards for mass voting. This means that people are directly injecting randomness into one of the core parts of the game, but the players who do it feel it's justified because it's a pain to get those rewards otherwise.
Re: How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would a person go to such great lengths Probably because adversarial coding is fun, and cheating at videogames is one of the best free ways to really get going doing that against a party that is really invested in stopping you. There's other options, but those are much more likely to lead to arrests.
What percentage of people who use cheats in video games took part in development of the code involved, vs just downloading and executing code written by someone else?
Some percentage. I'm sure there's other motivations, but I have no idea what those would be.
Re: How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the topic of the article is cheaters that compete with other players. Anti-cheats are not really necessary for games where the only person being cheated is the cheater. I also excluded professional players because the original poster was basically trying to get an answer regarding what kind of person would cheat when there was no extra incentive. Obviously, professional players or players in any games that of…
Anti-cheat is still a major issue on multiplayer games that are not PVP-centric, like MMOs. In these cases, the negative externalities of cheating are more like a tragedy of commons than griefing. Cheaters and bots screw up the economy and increase competition for training / farming areas, but generally only in aggregate. Much easier to justify than directly ruining someones experience by killing them instantly every…
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Re: How anti-cheats catch cheaters using memory heuristics
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call this spyware; it doesn't seem to reach outside of its own process (though I guess it does report back what you could call analytics).
BattlEye apparently comes with a kernel component called BEDaisy which preemptively tries to block attempts to patch Windows API functions. That has some people calling it a root kit or spyware.
Having a game that fumbles with kernel internals is insane. That should simply be not possible privilege wise.