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ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

play.esea.net

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Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#31

Post by lmm »

leethax0r wrote: post #21
shitlord wrote: post #14

This isn't surprising in the least. Anti-cheat clients are the worst, ever scummier than anti-virus clients. If anyone here has ever played a game that used Inca GameGuard, you know what I'm talking about. If you open a page in your web browser with a title that seems suspicious to GameGuard, it can fucking REBOOT your computer without warning! And that's not the only client with such problems. From my experience, it…

...did you just imply that anti virus programs are shady?

Isn't that common knowledge? Many antivirus programs have a worse effect on system stability/performance than the things they're supposed to prevent.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#32

Post by Cthulhu_ »

nyar wrote: post #11

From what I understand the guy who runs ESEA is pretty much saying "Yeah, we were talking about this one day and did it. Now you've caught us, so we'll be removing it and giving everyone a free month. We also made $3000 something dollars by mining with your computers, but we don't want you to be mad at us, so we won't do it again. But we totally had no problem with this earlier."

For correctness' sake, they didn't make $3000, they made 30 BTC, which could be sold on the market for approximately $3000 at the current rates, minus transaction fees and plus or minus market fluctuations.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#33

Post by dreen »

lucb1e wrote: post #26
krichman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An hour of GPU is not much. I think a single GPU can do a few Megahashes per second. To hit one BTC/day you would need about 20 Gigahashes per second all day. I think they'd make a bunch more by showing you the ads. http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

But 1btc/day is >$100/day. They don't make that much on a single client showing ads. More like $0.10 at most, or 0.001btc (which takes much less mining power).

I don't know how popular their client is but I have a HD7970 which is not bad at all (enough to run any currently released game on full settings) and when I don't game I let it mine which gives me about $0.5 - $0.75 a day.

I'm in it for the women tho not the money.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#34

Post by [deleted] »

lucb1e wrote: post #26
krichman wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An hour of GPU is not much. I think a single GPU can do a few Megahashes per second. To hit one BTC/day you would need about 20 Gigahashes per second all day. I think they'd make a bunch more by showing you the ads. http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

But 1btc/day is >$100/day. They don't make that much on a single client showing ads. More like $0.10 at most, or 0.001btc (which takes much less mining power).

[deleted]

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#35

Post by makomk »

dvt wrote: post #17
pale_rider wrote: post #16

The thread is closed, which links to an explanation, which is below: ----------------------------------- [lpkane] - 5.1.13 at 1:46am lol that got aggressive quickly back towards the end of march, as btc was skyrocketing, jaguar and i were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of gpus logged into the client to mine we went back and forth about it, considered doing something for april fools…

And then that thread was closed. And this one was opened: http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=forums&d=topic&id=4... Turns out the ~$280 turned into over $3,500. And the 48 hours turned into 8 days.

Yeah. Only after several people in the first thread figured out that their antivirus software had been detecting the miner for much longer than 48 hours, and one of them contacted the pool used to confirm how much had actually been made, though.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#37

Post by drucken »

shitlord wrote: post #14

This isn't surprising in the least. Anti-cheat clients are the worst, ever scummier than anti-virus clients. If anyone here has ever played a game that used Inca GameGuard, you know what I'm talking about. If you open a page in your web browser with a title that seems suspicious to GameGuard, it can fucking REBOOT your computer without warning! And that's not the only client with such problems. From my experience, it…

Yup, this is the notorious nProtect Gameguard (http://global.nprotect.com/product/gg.php).

It is even worse than most anti-cheat clients which "only" monitor and notify.

Not only will it actively pre-emptively change the state of your programs, some changes irrecoverably, but in addition it cannot be independently uninstalled, i.e. the game publisher who bundles it has to provide an uninstaller for it or it will not be uninstalled if you remove the game.

Gameguard is also believed to contain a keylogger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NProtect_GameGuard).

It is basically a commercial rootkit that is relatively easily circumvented by cheaters anyway.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#39

Post by nnash »

pale_rider wrote: post #16

The thread is closed, which links to an explanation, which is below: ----------------------------------- [lpkane] - 5.1.13 at 1:46am lol that got aggressive quickly back towards the end of march, as btc was skyrocketing, jaguar and i were talking about how cool it would be if we could use massive amounts of gpus logged into the client to mine we went back and forth about it, considered doing something for april fools…

>anyway, our bad, we just released a client update with the btc stuff removed, and your $280 is going into the s14 prize pot

To be honest I thought that this was what the story was originally going to be about. They should add it in as an opt-in setting so people can support ESEA's tournaments.

Re: ESEA turned anti-cheat client into BTC miner

#40

Post by username111 »

shitlord wrote: post #14

This isn't surprising in the least. Anti-cheat clients are the worst, ever scummier than anti-virus clients. If anyone here has ever played a game that used Inca GameGuard, you know what I'm talking about. If you open a page in your web browser with a title that seems suspicious to GameGuard, it can fucking REBOOT your computer without warning! And that's not the only client with such problems. From my experience, it…

The difference here is that ESEA was the most trusted league in America and the majority of competitive cs players have subscribed to it for 7 dollars a month. (The anti-cheat was only one aspect of the client)
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