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

Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

codeneverdies.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 167 posts

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#71

Post by have-a-break »

SteveNuts wrote: post #30
garrettjoecox wrote: post #9

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. 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 wal…

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

[dead]

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#72

Post by tines »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #39
SteveNuts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

For a lot of them, they aren't cheating, they are compensating for bad teammates, bad servers, other cheaters, bad hit reg, bad sound effects, bad whatever they can dream up. Cheating is "this is my actual skill level if there wasn't so much bullshit happening to me" Of course this is all a lie, but it's what they tell themselves.

This is only true for the people who use the cheats, not the people who make them.

For the people who make them it's an intellectual exercise, like solving a puzzle, it's an end in itself. That and the social credit it gives you among your technical friends.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#73

Post by tines »

garrettjoecox wrote: post #9

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. 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 wal…

How did editing memory offsets auto-fire based on enemies entering your crosshairs? To my knowledge this would require some code hooking at least. (Or are you using "editing memory offsets" to mean "writing new instructions into the process' memory"?)

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#74

Post by tines »

mschuster91 wrote: post #41
garrettjoecox wrote: post #9

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. 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 wal…

> 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... The thing is, VAC doesn't immediately ban you. Or anyone else. It's looking for suspicious patterns across hundreds if not t…

Unlikely. Last I looked, VAC only looks at a few gross elements, like the names of the DLLs loaded into the game's process. If you don't match a blacklisted name, you're probably not detected.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#75

Post by candiddevmike »

Nextgrid wrote: post #48
SteveNuts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

In games where available weapons/gear depends on some global "level", this could be a way to get your desired weapons without having to grind for weeks/months. I guess a silver lining of "pay to win" games is that you can now pay to avoid that. I remember trying to hack the levelling-up mechanism on Crysis 2 - it worked by sending your post-game stats (client-side) to a master server, so editing those stats in memory…

I wish more games let folks choose to grind for things or just have everything unlocked without grinding. I already have a job, I just want to play a game without another grind. I know some people love the grind, but I don't, I much prefer the L4D style "play what you want, how you want".

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#76

Post by tines »

bravetraveler wrote: post #66
SteveNuts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

I, quite literally , got a career! Started as a technical curiosity, gave me in-roads to very weird corners of the internet. Got to know many professionals I wouldn't have, otherwise. Ultimately served as the most effective networking I ever did.

Same here :) Best learning experience of my entire life. Would recommend.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#77

Post by spookie »

WilcoKruijer wrote: post #49
malwrar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to write cheats for CSS & other Source games. Not sure if the original CS would have the same vuln, but iirc you used to be able to use an INetChannel::ReceiveFile function with path traversal to grab the server config. There were a few cool hacks around the file path filtering logic they added in my era that (combined with ::SendFile) enabled a fun period of arbitrary RCE on Source servers. I knew one person…

This exploit has its origin in the Quake engine. I remember exploiting the same thing in CoD4 (2007) and I believe even the release version of Black Ops I was vulnerable. It was known as the ‘q3dirtrav’ vulnerability.

Well, it was running the same engine (q3) even if heavily modified.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#78

Post by winkelmann »

bob1029 wrote: post #5

I am not a fan of the signature-based techniques used by VAC, et. al. 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 fro…

> Having anything open like cheat engine or Tsearch while you join a lobby is a guaranteed ban no matter what.

I think a no-brainer solution here, which I am surprised isn't used, is to just immediately kick the account when a well-known signature, such as CheatEngine, is detected. If the program isn't even attempting to get around VAC, there is no point in doing the whole "delayed ban" thing.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#79

Post by aeonik »

invokestatic wrote: post #67
bob1029 wrote: post #5

I am not a fan of the signature-based techniques used by VAC, et. al. 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 fro…

Actually, VAC handles Cheat Engine and the like very well. You won’t get banned for simply having them open, only for having them attached to the game, which I think is reasonable.

I used to use CheatEngine on single player games that I ran through Steam, and I don't recall Steam having a problem with that at the time. Not sure if it's changed, but it was pretty reasonable.

Never used it on Multiplayer games though.

Re: Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

#80

Post by bee_rider »

SteveNuts wrote: post #30
garrettjoecox wrote: post #9

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike. 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 wal…

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore. There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

In single player games it is just another way to have fun. I mean, Minecraft creative mode is essentially equivalent to turning on all the cheats. It removes all the built-in challenge and then you come up with your own game.

It doesn’t seem very appealing to me, but I don’t think there’s any particularly interesting psychology behind it. Rather one could say I lack creativity and need monsters to motivate me to build anything.

Cheating in real competitive games is rude, though, for sure. But most people don’t play top-level competitive games.

Cheating in pseudo-competitive games like Overwatch or Dota is both rude and stupid. Because the game can just find people to match your cheat-augmented skill level anyway.

Post reply on HN