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Games

Video Game Cheaters Outed By Logic Bombs 224

Posted by timothy from the curiosity-burns-as-hot-as-malice dept.
Lirodon writes: A Reddit user decided to tackle the issue of cheaters within Valve's multiplayer shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive in their own unique way: by luring them towards fake "multihacks" that promised a motherlode of cheating tools, but in reality, were actually traps designed to cause the users who installed them to eventually receive bans. The first two were designed as time bombs, which activated functions designed to trigger bans after a specific time of day. The third, which was downloaded over 3,500 times, caused instantaneous bans.
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Video Game Cheaters Outed By Logic Bombs More

Video Game Cheaters Outed By Logic Bombs

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  • Video Game Entrapment? (Score:5, Informative)

    by blueshift_1 ( 3692407 ) on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @02:00PM (#51422311)
    I hope we can get Sean Connery to play the lead role again...

  • Assholes against assholes (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @02:04PM (#51422341)

    Looks like a classical case of vigilantism.

    • Looks like a classical case of mafia.

  • Why do I care abou this? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @02:06PM (#51422357)

    If doesn't help prevent cheating in tux racer or bzflag why do I care? This tool was probably written in Rust too, wasn't it? Don't lie

  • Just a fucking game (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @02:06PM (#51422361)

    It's bad enough you play it religiously, but cheating in it to get ahead? What a fucking loser.

    It's the equivalent of cheating at old people's bingo night. Actually, it's even worse because at least if you cheat at bingo you have a chance to win money.

    • Re:Just a fucking game (Score:5, Interesting)

      by RogueyWon ( 735973 ) on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @05:30PM (#51424259) Journal

      Way back in the distant dawn of time (or at least, of competitive Counter-Strike play), I ran a major UK Counter-Strike league. Cheating was a pretty big issue back then (not least because software anit-cheat was much less developed) and we spent a lot of time on the watch for it. In the 18 months or so I was running the league, we had maybe 10 cheat detections during competitive play. The guys running the "open" public servers sponsored by the same company were getting a similar number of detections in the average week.

      By and large, I think there were three reasons why people cheated. The first was simple curiosity; people who were bored of playing the game honestly and just wanted to see what the cheats were like. There probably weren't too many of these.

      The largest group were the trolls; the people who cheated not because it was fun in itself, but because they got off on pissing off other people and screwing up their leisure time. Some of them would try to hide their cheating, but a lot of them were pretty damned open about it. After all, it's annoying to play a guy you think might be cheating. It's even worse to play a guy who is open and proud about the fact he's cheating, in a world where it can take time (up to an hour, on the public servers) to summon an admin.

      The third kind were the properly competitive gamers who felt they were struggling to keep up with the pack and thought that by making subtle use of cheats, they could give themselves an edge. This was the only kind we tended to see in the competitive league. "Pro-gaming" was in its infancy back then, but was already becoming "a thing" and there was sponsorship and prize money floating around. There were lots of players who frankly weren't good enough who thought they could make a fist of pro-gaming. When it became clear that they weren't cut out for it (you need both a hell of a lot of practice time and god's own natural reflexes to cut it in that world), they'd often resort to cheats. They would always try to hide the fact they were cheating, so unless you got a rare software detection, discerning cheating from good or lucky play was hard (but not impossible) for an admin.

  • A new low for Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Linking to a subreddit, this is a new low.

    • But, it's only 3 days late so that makes it okay!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by BronsCon ( 927697 )
      Why hasn't Netcraft confirmed the death yet?

    • How many "new lows" can /. suffer?

      I mean... by now we have passed all the way through the Earth and are, perhaps, halfway out of the Solar System...

      Every single article has at least 1 "new low" comment... clearly they can't all be true.

  • "Video Game Cheaters Outed By Logic Bombs"

    That's why I play it smart and never use logic!
    • Make mistakes and confuse your opponent.

    • Re:Lesson learned (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @02:55PM (#51422783) Homepage

      A friend of mine and I used to play a football video game back in the NES days. He would employ football strategy to plan his maneuvers, but i knew nothing of the game so I's just choose random plays and button mash. More often than not, I'd beat him because he couldn't figure out what my strategy was to make a counter to it. He'd plan a defense based on the most logical (to someone who knows football) offense, but I'd do something completely different and would win.

      • Took me a while to figure out that in real football the optimal strategy wasn't having the quarterback run back about 40 yards then throw a hail mary(the actual best tactic in the original Tecmo bowl game)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yunzil ( 181064 )

        From the Meaning of Liff:

        Aboyne (vb.): To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him.

    • "Video Game Cheaters Outed By Logic Bombs" That's why I play it smart and never use logic!

      It's an error by the editors. The title should be "Video Game Cheaters outed by other Video Game Cheaters."

  • Offline, single player ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @02:21PM (#51422497) Homepage

    This is why I continue to prefer console games with no internet access ... I don't have to worry about the other guy cheating, but if the company made ways for me to "cheat" it doesn't hurt anybody.

    If I want infinite ammo and can't die, who cares if I'm sitting in my basement and nobody else is affected?

    Cheat codes used to be part of the fun of one-player games.

    • I loved playing single-player games with cheat codes. I'd enter "It is a good day to die" into Warcraft (original - before all this "World Of" stuff) and would send a now immortal peon to take out the enemy's entire army. I'd also give myself unlimited money in SimCity and just buy out all the competing civilizations except for one city that I'd keep around to keep the game from ending. (I called that my "Microsoft Strategy.")

      • I'd also give myself unlimited money in SimCity and just buy out all the competing civilizations except for one city that I'd keep around to keep the game from ending. (I called that my "Microsoft Strategy.")

        I feel like... I feel like you've combined SimCity with Civilization to create some weird mega-game!

        • Shoot... Meant to type Civilization. I used to do the same with SimCity, though. I'd build a city, purposely unleash a few dozen disasters on it, and then use cheat codes to give myself unlimited resources so I could rebuild.... only to wreck havoc on the city again.

    • In this case, the cheats allow things like auto-aim that instantly headshots the target, and wall hacks that allow you to see the other players through walls. There are also speed hacks, and I am sure many more hacks I haven't even heard about.

      There is no enjoyment in it except ruining the game for everyone else.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zedrick ( 764028 )
      > Cheat codes used to be part of the fun of one-player games.

      For me, finding cheat "codes" was (and is) part of the fun. Figuring out that Pirates! on the Amiga stored money x10 in the save file (for example, 20 gold = $C8) was the first kind of hacking (in a very broad sense) I did, or can remember.

      And I still enjoy figuring out stuff like that in modern single player games, even if it makes actually playing the game less rewarding.
    • Too bad they now sell these cheat codes and extras as DLC. The videogame business needs another crash.
  • I'm beginning to suspect some new hacks have come out for HL2:Deathmatch recently. I've played regularly for years and I've seen plenty of obvious hacks, but I've also seen plenty of players that are just way better than me. Took a couple month break to play Fallout 4, and now that I'm back I'm seeing a lot of people that were middle of the pack two months ago doing all kinds of crazy crap and suddenly kicking ass. The community is pretty small these days, so it's not like you don't run into the same peo

    • have you taken a break that long before?

      a month or two will seriously fuck up your aim and your timing, and that combined with other players improving quickly can be pretty thumping. I think two months off from one of my old favorites, and it took me a couple weeks to almost get back to where i was.

      you're talking about half-life two, so i'm assuming you've got something like 1000 hours into it at least. you're still playing it, so i'm going to assume you play it at a decently high level. When you play at

  • A Reddit user...

    Explains a lot...

  • I don't play Counterstrike, but I do abhor cheaters of any type! Good for the company to make these honey pits, play a badger game, whatever it takes to crush the godz-cursed scum of the earth.

    • I don't play Counterstrike, but I do abhor cheaters of any type! Good for the company to make these honey pits, play a badger game, whatever it takes to crush the godz-cursed scum of the earth.

      The company didn't do this, another cheater did. They turned on each other, just like the bible said they would.

  • Logic bombs? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @03:00PM (#51422835) Journal

    I don't think "logic bomb" means what the submitter thinks it means (the stories don't use that term). These were trojans.

    • Clickbaiters suck balls. It appears they used "Logic Bombs" because that phrase conjures up a more interesting picture of what happened than "Greedy Idiot Gamers Self Banned By Trojans."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

      I don't think "logic bomb" means what the submitter thinks it means (the stories don't use that term). These were trojans.

      I think it means exactly [wikipedia.org] what the submitter thinks it means, and is right.

      The first two "multihacks" contained a time-triggered change that caused the user to get banned. It's unclear whether the third only activated when joining an online game or instead unconditionally did something that was only checked by Valve when going online.

      Either you don't realize that most of those fall withi

      • It actually Did the things it was supposed to do.

        It didn't contain any malware.

        Its downloader-claimed flaw was that it accomplished it's primary functions in such a way as to be easily noticed, which Actually Did perform the Overall Intent of the program as written by the programmer; which was to Draw the permaban for the downloader.

        I would call that a Meatspace Hack, more than anything. :)

        Code to overwrite all the HD boot files would have been just as easy to get them to load, lol.

        The first programs were d

  • Please, could someone PLEASE explain the logic behind cheating in multiplayer games?

    Either you win. Then you won because you used a cheat. It was not your skill, you're not better than the person you triumped over, a dog with his paws tied to the keyboard could have done it.

    Or you lose. Then you're even too stupid to win when you cheat. It's like having LOSER stamped on your forehead.

    So why would anyone want to cheat?

    • Have you met any humans?

      Because, really ... if it's got rules, someone is cheating.
      Winning by cheating doesn't seem to bother people, and it never has.

      Are you seriously surprised by this? Has anything about human nature left you thinking you should expect otherwise?

      • I am aware that humans tend to be irrational. That makes them funny to watch. But in this case it leaves me mystified.

        There is nothing to gain. If there was some additional benefit like, say, a trophy, money, any kind of motivation outside the feeling of winning, I could see this motivation as the reason behind cheating, wanting to gain this additional prize. But if there's nothing to be gained outside of the knowledge that, yes, you won, where is the benefit?

        I honestly don't understand this. This makes sim

        • I am aware that humans tend to be irrational

          Irrational? You don't think there are perfectly rational reasons for cheating?

          But if there's nothing to be gained outside of the knowledge that, yes, you won, where is the benefit?

          Because, smug is a surprising motivator ... either beating you without you knowing how, or just because the act was fun. Because it was there. Because they could.

          I honestly don't understand this. This makes simply no sense whatsoever. Not even by human standards.

          Wait, what? Since whe

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          I can only assume these cheating dimwits actually think they are good at the game and mostly won due to their skill. And of course they assume they are winning, but of course it's not really winning if you cheated - I don't think they understand this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Would you not enjoy having super powers? Cheats are super powers: you get to walk tall among the mere mortals. Most people don't have the slightest desire to be challenged, they just want to win.

    • Yeah see, here is what I think happens.

      The cheater wins because of the cheats. but it is not really about winning, it is about enjoying other people's pain. Even if it is about winning, the mental gymnastics required to make the cheater believe that it was justified are not all that complex. People do that kind of thing all the time. Take any given person's political beliefs. A lot of people will believe what they believe and have no trouble at all performing the necessary justifications in their head to bo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by iamacat ( 583406 )

      Please, could someone PLEASE explain the logic behind participating in multiplayer games?

      The rules of these games are made up anyway and winning is not an indication of any admirable real world trait or skill. So some people get a kick out of making yet another game out of beating the game without getting caught, seeing people hide behind walls they can see through and then fragging them and taunting them in chat.

  • And that is what the gaming community needs: someone like Joey Greco and his team of detectives to kick the doors in on these cheating bastards and expose them on camera in front of literally tens of people.

  • Just quietly stick the cheaters together. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @05:08PM (#51424049) Journal

    Valve should just quietly put the cheaters all by themselves, let them piss each other off whilst everyone else gets on with life.

    • oh god that would be great. instead of blanket VAC bans, cheaters can only get matched with other cheaters. Add spectator mode for non-cheater accounts and you have the makings of a popular YouTube channel.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sowelu ( 713889 )

        That already happens doesn't it? With a VAC ban, you can't connect to VAC servers, but nothing stops banned people from connecting to non-VAC servers. It's just assumed they're full of hackers, so nobody else goes there (except pirates).

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