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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

mobeigi.com

261–270 of 372 posts

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#261
post #25

For UT2004, you can ban by player GUID (a hash of the CD key) or IP. With the game abandoned by Epic, a number of key generators have cropped up, which makes GUID bans useless. IP bans only go so far with VPNs costing $2 these days. The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans th…

On a counter-strike 1.6 server I help with moderating, we have the occasional cheater roll by, surprisingly often "ragehacking" with no attempt at subtlety (e.g. making noscope sniper headshots in mid air). Since the server owner insists on allowing non-steam accounts (pirated copies) to connect we can't rely on SteamID bans, similarly to GUID in Unreal. It's a bit trickier to change the spoofed ID as I assume it's b…

Changing steamid is easily doable on most nosteam cs 1.6 copies through a cfg file.

I used to administrate CS 1.6 until a few years ago. I got a question concerning amx_exec. I thought cl_filterstuffcmd basically killed any usage admin slowhacking?

or is it that most nosteam cs 1.6 client have it set to 0 ?

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#262
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we have a whitelist ability also, but it is definitely a last resort. The game is mostly dead and difficult to discover for new players. We don't want that roadblock if we can avoid it.

TIL people still play UT2004. I was going to mention how much I loved that game, until I realized I played UT99. Time sure does fly...

I still play Quake 1 and 2 online, randomly pop into Tribes 2, Counter Strike 1.5....usually the community is clicky and toxic to outsiders but sometimes you bump into really neat people.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#263

Would it be worth charging for CSGO? Or Counter-Strike 2, whatever the latest is? Because being banned by Steam ID might mean something if you have to pay $10 each time for the privilege.

While the game is free, they do charge $14.99 if you want access to the ranked matchmaking called Premier. Sadly, the cost of entry is not enough to dissuade most cheaters it would seem.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#264

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 !

Well, it's just a genre that's immensely popular and easy to cheat in. If you have access to the game's memory etc, it's pretty easy to create an aimbot or thing that lets you see thru walls et cetera. How you gonna cheat in a moba? It's a strategy game, you need, like, cutting edge AI to beat the best humans at it. In fact OpenAI specifically worked on an AI to play Dota 2, it was that hard.

You don't need to improve your individual performance to cheat, anything that improves game-sense works just as well. A common one for moba (and other genres) is a radar style hack, which can show an overlay of the map with the player locations in real time. Knowing where you enemies are at all times is a HUGE advantage in a moba.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only problem is, a lot of companies do NOT want to pay for it. Because they're 10 years behind the curve and don't understand that a game's lifespan is contingent on anti-cheat. Once it becomes clear to the casual player that a hacker is going to effect every gaming session, the game dies quickly. Many games have gone so far as to obfuscate the presence of hackers so that players are less likely to notice them (CoD…

> Other games have an ID verified 3rd party system for competitive play (CSGO). Ha ha, you mean paying for the game and holding your Steam account as collateral?

Your steam account is unaffected by anti-cheat measures. Being banned (vac or otherwise) from CSGO does not prevent you from playing other games, nor from playing CSGO alone.

The only trace of it is that your account profile will show that you have vac bans on record, but you don't have to show your profile.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#266
It feels like cheating as become endemic, every game I've played online in the last 2-3 years seems to be rampant with cheating. I don't remember it being this big of an issue 5-10 years ago, or maybe I was just ignorant to it? It's at the point now where I run into cheaters frequently enough that I find it hard to justify investing time into multiplayer games anymore.

I can only assume the recent uptick is due to games adding tradable cosmetic items which has made it financially viable to cheat as most cheaters seem happy to drop a lot of money on cheats as well as $80 to re-buy a game once they eventually get banned.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main solutions we have today are IP ban + VPN blocking using a database of known VPN subnets and adding them all to the firewall, and a similar fingerprinting technique which scans their folder structure of certain system folders. No. VPN blocking is useless to stop malicious actors as most residential connections have DHCP and VPN subnets are added and removed somewhat frequently, it's not that hard to find a…

Excluding someone on VPN from playing UT2004 on a specific server is not an abuse of their human rights

where was the parent mentioning this is a violation of one's human rights exactly?

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it would only work on games where the client and server both authenticate, otherwise none of this will work as there would be no reputation to be relied on.

I agree, just thought I would mention. :) > A smurf is a player who creates another account to play against lower-ranked opponents in online games. Happens in many games, including League of Legends on which people typically spend a lot of money.

I've even seen the weird combination of the client and server both authenticating, but the account owner being given a choice if they want to 'level up'. It essentially means your public reputation and match history (and actual experience) no longer align.

I suppose that matters less if we're doing checks on the actual data, but for the player base, you cannot rely on what the game reports about the experience of your opponent, which makes for very confusing matchups (and the accusations that go with it).

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#270
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tactic 4chan uses: Regular IPs can post freely VPN or mobile IPs (blacklisted) must pay for a key ($20/year) that allows posting from blacklisted IPs. Key is good for posting from one blacklisted IP, locked for 30 minutes, so users cannot share keys. That way, you can ban the user by their key, if their IP is public. It's not a perfect solution but it seems to be the best they've found for such a situation so far…

I mean, in this case it's 4chan so who cares, but I hope we are not very slowly moving towards a troubling world with lower classes of IPs and upper class IPs. IPs should be IPs should be IPs, it shouldn't matter whether it comes from an ISP, a mobile network, a VPN, or anything else, and we shouldn't attach some kind of IP caste to providers or countries. I think we really need Internet-wide IP randomization, where…

Ever read Pirate Cinema?

Anyway, it's a tradeoff between dealing with bad actors effectively and not impacting common users. There's a lot more bad actors than common users running into those sorts of IP bans though.

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