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We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

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Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#351

Post by Apofis »

sebstefan wrote: post #290
DanielHB wrote: post #284

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

That likely wouldn't work, doesn't mean the letters were simply rotated. Would probably be just random.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#352

Post by doctorpangloss »

sfn42 wrote: post #350
doctorpangloss wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VAC bans prevent you from playing on secured servers across all of Steam. https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/571A-97DA-70E9-FF... > Q: Can I use bans in other games to block users from playing in my game? > A: No. VAC and Game bans should only prevent the user from playing on VAC secured servers in the game they received a ban in. A permanent ban should only be issued for your game if the user was caught ch…

I have 2 vac bans and they've never had any impact on anything other than the games I was banned from. One was from letting my friend use my steam account, I wasn't using it and when I wanted to use it my password was changed and I had a vac ban in CS 1.6. He said it wasn't him, I'm not convinced. The other was in Dungeon Defenders. The game had a confusing policy where you were allowed to cheat on the "Open" servers…

Your payment for the game was the smallest amount of collateral that was taken from you.

The cheating server situation is a similar concept to hell banning but poorly executed.

Hell banning is the status quo. If you try to play Overwatch they probably query VAC and might match make you with other people with VAC bans.

It’s hard to know without working for the game studio.

There is no hard technical solution to preventing cheating for many games. It depends how you describe insurmountable DRM or anti piracy measures, such as operating the only copy of the game’s backend server code. If people have no viable alternatives to playing on your remote servers, then you have an anti cheat solution. The net result is that all games, in a Darwinian way, start to look like this. Similarly on PS5, you cannot pirate their games practicably, so there is a vibrant single player business.

It all goes back to: are the only valid limitations on users insurmountable DRM? If we enforced copyright infringement in this or any country it would be a different story.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#353

Post by compootr »

SirMaster wrote: post #324
kurtoid wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of the article is that they set an identifier in the in-game browser, which will survive MAC address, IP resets, and new steam accounts.

They said if a user changes their IP and SteamID then it would be considered a new user and they wouldn't know. What did I miss?

did you even read half of the article?

summary: guy found that the IP and steam ids can be rotated with low cost, so he used the in-game web browser to set a persistent cookie (on that installation of the game), so once cheaters get banned, rotate their IP/steam id, they'll be banned until they clear the app's data.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#354

Post by sfn42 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #352
sfn42 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 2 vac bans and they've never had any impact on anything other than the games I was banned from. One was from letting my friend use my steam account, I wasn't using it and when I wanted to use it my password was changed and I had a vac ban in CS 1.6. He said it wasn't him, I'm not convinced. The other was in Dungeon Defenders. The game had a confusing policy where you were allowed to cheat on the "Open" servers…

Your payment for the game was the smallest amount of collateral that was taken from you. The cheating server situation is a similar concept to hell banning but poorly executed. Hell banning is the status quo. If you try to play Overwatch they probably query VAC and might match make you with other people with VAC bans. It’s hard to know without working for the game studio. There is no hard technical solution to preven…

I play both CS and overwatch, no issues. I'm not sure I've ever met a cheater in OW, and in CS they're rare. In CSGO I was selected for the anti cheat review mechanic, is that also called overwatch? Something like that.

Seems strange that they would discriminate based on vac bans in game but not for the people selected to judge others. Then again maybe my bans were too old.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#355

Post by jvanderbot »

trashburger wrote: post #339
jvanderbot wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is a human right.

Not when you are willingly connecting to a server. The server owner didn't force you to do it.

I'm clarifying the prior two comments, not advocating for anything.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#356

Post by SirMaster »

compootr wrote: post #353
SirMaster wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said if a user changes their IP and SteamID then it would be considered a new user and they wouldn't know. What did I miss?

did you even read half of the article? summary: guy found that the IP and steam ids can be rotated with low cost, so he used the in-game web browser to set a persistent cookie (on that installation of the game), so once cheaters get banned, rotate their IP/steam id, they'll be banned until they clear the app's data.

I read the whole article.

Which sounds trivially easy...

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#357

Post by ghxst »

ec109685 wrote: post #185
ghxst wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This still leaves you wide open to cheaters using mobile data tethering and proxies. Have you considered more advanced network analysis? It's one of the areas I have an interest in (professionally and personally) so if you want any suggestions let me know.

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

You toggle airplane mode and you have a new IP and the old one you are banned on is now used by someone innocent.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#358

Post by AtlasBarfed »

tomooot wrote: post #225
snarfy wrote: 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…

It seems to me that what is needed is a "provisional" server that grants you access to the "good" server.

So an GUID accumulates reputation after some amount of play in the provisional server. If you get enough reputation by not cheating, the GUID gets whitelisted for the "good" server. You can have multiple tiers, so the really good/fun people get to the third of fourth tier of demonstrated non-cheating.

If they cheat, get banned, they need to climb the tiers with GUIDs again. The cheaters will want to cheat, they won't want to pay the dues. The legit players will happily try to get to the second and third tiers, so you could probably just require 1 hour of not-cheating for the first tier of server, and then maybe 8 hours to get to the third tier.

You could shadowban/honeypot after the first tier, so you shut all cheaters that you detect to their own cheater server where the cheaters can all get shunted to.

Re: We outsmarted CSGO cheaters with IdentityLogger

#359

Post by OfficeChad »

stevefan1999 wrote: post #307

> I'm not being funny and I mean no disrespect. > But cheaters are cunts. They're cunts now, they've always been cunts. > And the only thing that's going to change is they're going to become bigger cunts. > Maybe have some more cunt kids. That statement is really shows how big of a dick you are, like come on man, it's just a game. Without learning game cheats and writing trojans and botnets since 14, although I'm kin…

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