Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

mobeigi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 372 posts

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#231

Post by emaro »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #227
santialbo wrote: post #223

Banning new Steam IDs on banned IPs seems too strict to me. Some ISP use CG-NAT or rotate IPs, meaning a single bad actor could harm many innocent players.

This is mentioned in the article, hence why they added a third method.

They added the third identifier to detect ban evasion by changing the Steam ID and the IP address.

They implemented some specific exceptions but generally recommended to not play on untrusted networks to avoid getting banned along cheaters in the same network.

That's my take from the article.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#232

Post by Ekaros »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #230
BlueTemplar wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

That system incentives against it. Your inventory becomes locked meaning worthless if you get the proper ban. So for farming stuff, it is much better not to cheat.

Not that there isn't options of making money that do benefit from cheating. Like creating high ranking accounts to sell. Which some people buy for the status of the rank...

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#233

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ultimafan wrote: post #76

Cheating in online games is a scourge and I really don't understand why people do it. It's one person selfishly getting a "win" at the expense of ~60 other people in that match having their time, pleasure, potentially money absolutely wasted. I think even more infuriating than blatant hacking is this epidemic of "micro cheating" for lack of a better way to put it that I've seen prevalent in some games that just boost…

In the case of CSGO, playing means earning lootboxes, and the items contained therein can be resold / auctioned off. It's the same problem as in Diablo 3 when it first launched, you could sell items found (randomly) in-game for real money. I read one guy's project, I'm sure it was posted on HN, who had 25 bots / copies of the game running to monitor the in-game currency market for deals, then resell those for real money.

Every once in a while there would be a ban wave - implying bot detection and handling was a manual / batch job process - but he'd just get 25 new copies / accounts, the income he made was more than enough to make up for it.

Of course, that assumes he was able to funnel the money out quick enough. And also, both Valve and Blizzard have their own incentive to not be too hard on bots, as they get a cut for every transaction. As long as people don't stop playing / paying because of bots.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#234

Post by guappa »

willcipriano wrote: post #42
Night_Thastus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only problem is, a lot of companies do NOT want to pay for it. It's 'treadmill work'. No matter how many people and how much money you throw at the problem, it still ends up just coming back. It's a losing battle because there are many, many more players than there are developers.

My idea: 1. Determine minimum human reaction times and limit movement to within those parameters on the client side. (For example a human can't swing their view around [in a fps] in a microsecond so make that impossible on the client) this will require a lot of user testing to get right, get pro players and push their limits. 2. Build a 'unified field theory' for your game world that is aware of the client side const…

Even worse, now people will not automatically immediately kick them from the server.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#235

Post by cedws »

santialbo wrote: post #223

Banning new Steam IDs on banned IPs seems too strict to me. Some ISP use CG-NAT or rotate IPs, meaning a single bad actor could harm many innocent players.

Yeah. IPs are NOT identifiers. At best they are a session ID. Using IPs to ban players on the basis that they've been used by a cheater before seems extremely unfair and probably even an opportunity for denial-of-service.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#236

Post by ricardo81 »

precommunicator wrote: post #221

> but the traffic itself was encrypted over HTTPS. This meant that even if one were to use a packet sniffing tool like Wireshark, you would not be able to find the raw token. It's trivial to decrypt HTTPS with tools like Fiddler or Burp Suite, assuming this build in browser used system proxy and system certificates list.

I think the author has the average script kiddie in mind, rather than the HN crowd.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#237

Post by Frotag »

0dayz wrote: post #220
Frotag wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning by TPM also makes ban evasion pretty expensive. At which point the cheater has to either buy a new mobo or solder a new TPM chip onto their mobo (not always possible). Though I guess at some point a sloppy vendor will leak TPM keys and it'll be spoof-able.

I could be wrong but couldn't you just get a pcie card that is effective a tpm card?

Ah you're right, I didn't know external TPM modules were a thing. Looks like they're only ~10ish usd too.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#238

Post by Mashimo »

spyder wrote: post #199

At the part were he writes about the human analysis of game data, I thought the article would end up with training an AI or just statistical analysis on that data to identify players. That would have been a little more interesting (but harder to do) than exploiting the game.

That is actually how current CS cheat detection works. I think valve had a talk about it. I think it's called valve overwatch.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#240

Post by wdroz »

ultimafan wrote: post #76

Cheating in online games is a scourge and I really don't understand why people do it. It's one person selfishly getting a "win" at the expense of ~60 other people in that match having their time, pleasure, potentially money absolutely wasted. I think even more infuriating than blatant hacking is this epidemic of "micro cheating" for lack of a better way to put it that I've seen prevalent in some games that just boost…

Some "micro cheating" are really easy to develop. When I was younger and a bit bored, I wrote my own "micro-cheat" in AutoIt[0] with less than 10 lines of code.

This was for the game counter-strike (I don't remember which version, either Source or early CSGO). The logic of the cheat was:

  - I manually aim, with the sniper, close to the wall of an intersection
  - I press a special key, then when the pixel at the center of the screen change, simulate input mouse click to "fire"
This was fun for maybe 1-2h, but the fun was more about the success of the project (from an idea to a working cheat) than getting some free kills while playing.

[0] -- https://www.autoitscript.com/site/

Post reply on HN