Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)
codeneverdies.github.io

Unfortunately, doesn't look like the followup post (about analyzing the VAC DLLs) has been written.

I've lost a few steam accounts to accurate but unintended (i.e., not actually cheating) detection of debugging tools attached to totally unrelated processes on the same machine. Having anything open like cheat engine or Tsearch while you join a lobby is a guaranteed ban no matter what. Ethical hacking and malicious hacking are indistinguishable from the perspective of this kind of machine-wide blind signature detection.

Statistical techniques can dramatically reduce false positives in cases like this. If someone at Valve had taken 10 seconds to review my stats during the detected interval, they should have been able to conclude I was not a threat to fair play.

It's been a cat and mouse game since the dawn of gaming and e-sports.

Fun fact: CS 1.6 competetive had what was called "Organner" when teams switched over from CAL to CEVO (first paid e-sports online league) and as well as ESEA which is acclaimed for its anti-cheats; the pro players you see/saw such as n0thing, summit-1g (not saying he did cheat, he wasn't pro in CS1.6, 1g was a pug team that meant 1st generation and a lot of us were in it) -- but everybody in the pro scene around that did cheat, or had cheaters on their team.

n0thing was banned from CAL rigorously for cheating in CAL-Premier and rejoined with complexity after ringing for other teams in CS1.6 matches (ban evading). he's admitted to cheating in CS 1.6, and found fame with Counter-Strike 1.6'd Evil Geniuses organization which encompanied the old compLexity roster.

These dickheads went on to make fortunes; not to say that they weren't good in their own respects, but people such as n0thing openly admit, and will admit if you ask them on the stream if they cheated in 1.6 to get to where they're at.

You could inject cheat codes through your mouse drivers at LANs and if you set a low FOV aimbot, it was undetectable: IE triggers when you aim at their chest, aims up to hit the head; and had advanced net code modifiers to land bullets in places you weren't aiming all together.

Knowing this, completely ruined the pro scene and wanting to watch these matches and personalities all together. To know how many legitimate players out there were passionate about these games, looking to go pro, and really enjoy competing at the highest levels couldn't because the skill gap was so significant, and then even more so because pro players had undetectable cheats.

Still to this day it is virtually impossible to detect hacks, however games such as DotA2 make it signifcantly harder to cheat by only sending frames/updates when it should; rather than old games sending all player data. I believe Valorant has a decent system but all in all; I helped run the leagues and the level and problem at which cheating was occurring, was known about, and not being able to prove what you know, would make you SICK if you ever enjoyed competing in e-sports.

After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through walls and auto-fire as soon as they entered my crosshair.

I obviously only tried it out on an alt steam account for fear of the infamous VAC ban, but no such ban happened. I only toyed with it for a few weeks as I then grew disinterested but that definitely left a sour taste in my mouth for the "effectiveness" of VAC if a script kiddie like me at the time could throw together something custom in just a few hours, I'm sure it'd be much easier now with ChatGPT...

[1] https://github.com/frk1/hazedumper