Live data from Hacker News

We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

mobeigi.com

291–300 of 372 posts

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#291

I want to share a story in a somewhat related topic: anti web-scraping techniques The most devious version I ever seen of this, I was baffled, astonished and completely helpless: This website I was trying to scrap generated a new font (as in a .woff file) on every request, the font had the position of the letters randomly moved around (for example, the 'J' would be in place of the 'F' character in the .woff and so on…

LOL the replies are hilarious. You've sniped several nerds today. Neat story.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#292
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…

> There's also "illegal" amx plugins and commands, which are generally frowned upon and extremely abusable, but quite useful in these situations. My favorite (which most of the "illegal plugins" are based around) is amx_exec which essentially gives admins direct access to any client's in-game console, to run any command or set any setting!

Yes, we have something similar for UT2004, but only a handful of people are even aware it exists. It's too powerful and too easily abused. I have yet to share it, even with other admins.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#293

I want to share a story in a somewhat related topic: anti web-scraping techniques The most devious version I ever seen of this, I was baffled, astonished and completely helpless: This website I was trying to scrap generated a new font (as in a .woff file) on every request, the font had the position of the letters randomly moved around (for example, the 'J' would be in place of the 'F' character in the .woff and so on…

A downside is it makes the site unusable for screen readers and SEO, plus it adds backend costs (compared to a plain backend that serves static files) if it's generated dynamically, although one can pre-generate a bunch of variants and randomly pick one at runtime (which could be handled by the load balancer) to minimize the costs.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#294

I want to share a story in a somewhat related topic: anti web-scraping techniques The most devious version I ever seen of this, I was baffled, astonished and completely helpless: This website I was trying to scrap generated a new font (as in a .woff file) on every request, the font had the position of the letters randomly moved around (for example, the 'J' would be in place of the 'F' character in the .woff and so on…

> easily prevent mass-scraping due to sheer processing costs. my 2018 iPad Pro does OCR on images in Safari instantly. People only think OCR is slow because Adobe Acrobat still uses the same single-threaded OCR algo it’s had for decades now; then consider how blazing a GPU-based impl would be…

I dunno, I never measured it. If you are scraping billions of small social media posts I would expect it to add up and make it unviable.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#295

I want to share a story in a somewhat related topic: anti web-scraping techniques The most devious version I ever seen of this, I was baffled, astonished and completely helpless: This website I was trying to scrap generated a new font (as in a .woff file) on every request, the font had the position of the letters randomly moved around (for example, the 'J' would be in place of the 'F' character in the .woff and so on…

LOL the replies are hilarious. You've sniped several nerds today. Neat story.

I know right? I just scraped another website instead.

I am actually surprised no one went: "actually that technique is called 'chicken ostrich sandwich' and was first employed in babylon in 2000BC"

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#296

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…

> don't understand that a game's lifespan is contingent on anti-cheat Or you could spend a huge effort on cheatproofing only to find that no-one plays your game in the first place, e.g. Concord. I imagine getting cheaters in your game often falls into the "nice problem to have" category and it is easy to kick the can down the road.

Arguably it's table stakes because bad first impressions can kill a game at any point, perhaps especially at launch.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time of the events in the blog, CS:GO was NOT free, and yet there were still cheaters that apparently had access to 80+ accounts.

Why pay for the game when you can go to an onion site that will sell you hundreds of compromised accounts that own the game for a fraction of the price?

At that time CS:GO would cost around $3 during various Steam sales and it was possible to buy a huge amount of gift copies that could be stored in your Steam inventory. So one "legit" account would buy lots of copies and then "gift" them to new accounts that would go on a cheating spree.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want does mobile data tethering make it harder to ban an IP address?

Mobile networks are all IPv6. IPv4 traffic is behind CGNAT. As a result, you can't ban individual cheaters, you have to ban the whole network.

I don’t think CGNAT is particularly limited to mobile networks. If you don’t serve traffic on IPv6, more and more of it will be proxied.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#299

I want to share a story in a somewhat related topic: anti web-scraping techniques The most devious version I ever seen of this, I was baffled, astonished and completely helpless: This website I was trying to scrap generated a new font (as in a .woff file) on every request, the font had the position of the letters randomly moved around (for example, the 'J' would be in place of the 'F' character in the .woff and so on…

If it's just swapping letters then rather than trying to dive into the WOFF you could just get the garbled data and treat it as a cesar cypher, I guess. A few dozen rotations and you're through It's kind of annoying and prone to break but I'd rather have that than whatever Facebook is doing where every class name, ID & identifiable tags in the markup gets randomly generated every once in a while

Could be an arbitrary permutation or worse have multiple equivalent characters. Fonts can do a lot.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#300

I want to share a story in a somewhat related topic: anti web-scraping techniques The most devious version I ever seen of this, I was baffled, astonished and completely helpless: This website I was trying to scrap generated a new font (as in a .woff file) on every request, the font had the position of the letters randomly moved around (for example, the 'J' would be in place of the 'F' character in the .woff and so on…

So it's a Caesar cipher, which is trivial to break. You don't need OCR or any computationally intensive solution.
Post reply on HN