We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger • Hacker News Board

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#271

Post by johnisgood » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 11:46 AM UTC

oneplane wrote: post #269

johnisgood wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

> account owner being given a choice if they want to 'level up'

Like level up without getting XP by playing? That renders it pretty useless.

Speaking of, I hate games that are "pay to win".

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#272

Post by RALaBarge » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 11:52 AM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #156

LinuxAmbulance wrote: post #18

Excellent write up and solution. Cheating in video games makes for a wretched experience for those who don't cheat. It's crazy how rampant cheating in multiplayer games, especially competitive ones has gotten. Ten years ago, I thought it was at an extreme, but it's only gone up since then. Part of the problem is that for some software developers, writing cheats brings in a massive amount of money. So instead of some…

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 !

No, that figure is way off. Check out a website that sells digital goods or cheats and you will see that even far smaller games have cheats available.

Escape from Tarkov comes to mind. An extremely hard and niche first person shooter with RPG elements. It is a private Russian company so we don't know exact player numbers, but it is estimated to be ~200k by some hits in a google search.

There are people who will provide carry services and guns and gear for plenty of people who will pay for it, as well as other providers selling the cheats that the carriers use for a weekly fee. The people who are providing these services are getting paid in USD when their local currency has a far lower value. It isn't a moral thing, it is a money thing.

You know that you sometimes don't know a bug exists before someone exploits it or uses your software in a way that you did not think of. There are experts who stand to make tons of cash if they can create or use an exploit that people will pay money to advance with.

The only way to prevent this is something that no one wants to hear, but it needs to be a unique citizenship identifier of some sort, since HWIDs and other means of tracking are mostly useless.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#273

Post by jvanderbot » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 11:53 AM UTC

fazeirony wrote: post #268

jamespo wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Privacy is a human right.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#274

Post by animal531 » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 11:58 AM UTC

Players from big countries often miss out on the sense of community that exist in smaller ones. When there are only 3-4 servers worth of people playing a game every day you quickly come to know them all, which really adds to the banter and sense of enjoyment.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#275

Post by runsfromfire » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 12:01 PM UTC

jjmarr wrote: post #195

Systemmanic wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was screwed up about the NA ranks?

At the time, there were no people of very high ranks. I also queued office only which didn't help. It's basically impossible to keep one's rank at Supreme if you only play against Gold Nova or so due to the way the rating system works.

Yep - same story here with Nuke (the old one, but then it happened again on the new one too). Got to global and it was a ghost town save for the same 5 man we ran into every night.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#276

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 12:41 PM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #181

kbolino wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are already there and have been for a long time. Geoblocking is very common for low-effort DRM and abuse mitigation, common VPN providers are easy to detect by IP but generally frustrate and/or ignore abuse reporting (until serious illegal activity is committed), college and other institutional networks are often no better than VPNs in this regard, etc. The Internet hasn't been able to operate as a network of peer…

> until serious illegal activity is committed What do they do in such cases? Assuming they get the report after the fact and assuming their "no logging" promises are true, can they even do anything? They're not even supposed to know which customer did it, after all. If their promises are false, wouldn't they reveal their hand if they handed logs over willy nilly?

[deleted]

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#277

Post by lesuorac » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 12:49 PM UTC

Perhaps not applicable to a hidden web browser in counter strike but for public webpages you can apply the same fingerprint technique and only include the payload on _some_ page loads for non-fingerprinted users.

Has a very nice advantage of if they go looking for fingerprinting they may or may not find it by random chance. It is security through obscurity but by making the bar higher for ban evasion you did actually remove a lot of people.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#278

Post by tm-guimaraes » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 12:54 PM UTC

jeemusu wrote: post #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 ga…

Don’t most games with expensive cosmetics lock them behind paywalls?

I assume there is lots of cheating because of every game having matchmaking system for fair with rankings. And there’s a huge amount of people that feel locked into low ranking because of bad teammates (which makes no sense statistically speaking), and if they just bump something they would do well.

There’s others who just want to showoff an high ranking.

And the guys that just want a cheap win, at the expense of ruining everyone else game.

And then there’s the business of this. Cheat tool makers making money of these lind of people. High ranking players selling boosting services or high ranking accounts (smurfing and cheating feels very similar on the loosing side). And even the high ranking players selling player providing boosting can cheat to perform the service in less time.

Skill based matchmaking with any form of public ranking (showing a number or tier) will always be full of people trying to game the system instead of trying to get better at the game. Specially in team games.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#279

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:06 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #143

johnisgood wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you referring to by "gamesense"? FWIW you can implement all sorts of movement hacks, from dodging bullet particles to appearing laggy enough to seem to be teleporting.

Gamesense: a mental model of the game by which players can anticipate and pre-empt the actions of other players. A CS:GO player with good gamesense will habitually keep their crosshairs at head height and aim at corners where an enemy is likely to emerge. They'll have an intuitive sense of how long it takes to run from one point on the map to another. They'll listen through walls for footsteps to try and decode where…

[deleted]

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#280

Post by robertlagrant » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 1:09 PM UTC

hypercube33 wrote: post #260

robertlagrant wrote: post #257

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.

I used to believe this, but in Call of Duty you burn $40-60 a ban plus it was or is tied to a phone number at one point and that didn't slow cheating down one bit. It's ultimately why my group quit playing.

But in that case I suppose you could pass around a disk, at least for physical. For digital-only I imagine it would be more expensive.