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Games

Valve Bans 40,000 Accounts After Laying a Trap For Cheaters In Dota 2 (theverge.com) 89

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts have been permanently banned in the last few weeks after they were caught red-handed using third-party software to cheat the game. In a blog post published on Tuesday, Valve revealed that it had recently patched a known issue used by third-party software to cheat in Dota while simultaneously setting a honeypot trap to catch players using the exploit. According to Valve, the cheating software gave its users an unfair advantage by accessing information used internally by the Dota client that shouldn't be visible during gameplay. After investigating how it worked, the developer then decided to identify and remove the "bad actors" from the active Dota playerbase.

"We released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using," Valve said. "This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits." Valve claims that all 40,000 of the now-banned accounts had accessed this hidden section of data, and that it had "extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved." Valve highlighted that the number of accounts banned was especially significant due to how prevalent this particular family of cheating clients is, and that the action taken is just one step in an ongoing campaign to tackle those abusing the popular MOBA game. "While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible, and use it to make our position clear: If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you're playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota," warned Valve.

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Valve Bans 40,000 Accounts After Laying a Trap For Cheaters In Dota 2

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  • Curious to see (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The-Ixian ( 168184 ) on Friday February 24, 2023 @08:09AM (#63319635)

    What the backlash arguments are for why this is a bad thing.

    On its face, this seems like an encouraging move by Valve. Kudos!

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Better hope your anti-virus software never scans that data.

      Does it affect other games? Your Steam account?

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Better hope your anti-virus software never scans that data.

        Anti-virus software will scan that area. But it would do it once per scan.

        Cheat programs were caught scanning that memory area continuously - Valve deliberately put honeypot data there and never reads from it. Cheat software finds the area full of useful information and it's scanned repeatedly.

        Does it affect other games? Your Steam account?

        Well, I'm sure Valve Anti-Cheat will probably carry over into your account as being a cheater, which might affe

        • Re:Curious to see (Score:5, Informative)

          by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Friday February 24, 2023 @10:18AM (#63319945)

          That's not 100% how cheat software works, it's often less sophisticated, either hooking the binary already in memory, or patching the C/C++ runtime so that it intercepts access to parts of memory it wants to look at.

          It has to be said that ASLR should be preventing "memory scanning" from working in the first place. But this feature is rarely turned on in Windows for applications that must still support 32-bit environments or Windows Vista or older.

          The reason why ALL cheats are detectable in the first place is because cheaters often do-not-give-a-shit, and run stuff they find on hacker forums without a second thought as to how they work. Nearly every MMO has "hacks" on one german forum, and that forum operates out in the clear, and is easily found, because the people who develop for-profit botting advertise there.

          Most cheats aren't even developed in a way to be hidden, they used some generic trampoline library which makes it easy to locate by anti-cheat programs, and then they write their cheat tools in C# or Python or something that is easily detected by anti-cheat software. Cheaters are stupid, but the wannebe hackers tend to be even stupider. Any real cheat that someone might use to gain an advantage, they will keep close to their chest, write it in C, and invoke specific compilation options to keep anti-cheat software from being able to see what it's doing.

          This is why if you really want to cheat in MMO games, you need a second computer to proxy through so the anti-cheat software can't see that the data is being modified. But if you're streaming to profit from this, as soon as your eyes leave your screen, your accountability goes out the window.

          Hence these bulk bans will only really catch idiots and not anyone who knows what they're doing, which might only be like a small handful of people.

          • Hence these bulk bans will only really catch idiots and not anyone who knows what they're doing, which might only be like a small handful of people.

            That's fine. Less idiots making the internet a worse place is a good start.

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Surely the connection to the server is encrypted, making the second computer proxy system redundant.

            Not so useful in an MMO, but I have seen recent ones that use HDMI video capture and image recognition to auto-aim. They try to simulate realistic mouse movement inputs (via USB, cloning a legit gaming mouse) so it's very difficult to detect them. There have been a lot of false positives against players who are just really good at fast aiming.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Do you ever say anything positive about anything? Always doom and gloom with you.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Banning is the wrong approach. The cheaters will just make new accounts and the suffering of honest players continues. Window dressing to make it look like Valve is doing something, while accomplishing nothing.

      Instead game companies need to institute shadow bans. Any account proved to be cheating gets put in a separate lobby. They can still play the game with other cheaters, but never again with the regular player pool. Let those fuckers aimbot each other all they want and leave the rest of us the

    • Because non-perfect CPU prefetchers can wander about accidentally, causing a random 4K page to be loaded.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        CPUs do not prefetch 4k pages.

      • by Megane ( 129182 )
        Most likely it was "bait" data that looked like what the cheat software was scanning for, then the cheat software would send back packets using the fake data, that would never have come from a "clean" client.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, they did not scan the user's systems or invade privacy, they only monitored something inside their own software and they credibly got very high confidence of a cheating attempt. And they banned the fuckers, unfortunately only for DOTA 2. Nope, cannot find anything bad here except that maybe they should kick these assholes off any STEAM multiplayer games entirely.

    • by Z80a ( 971949 )

      If anything it's probably an example of how you should carry anti cheating.
      Instead of making horrible black boxed malware that break compatibility and open doors for a myriad of exploits, you literally target at the tool and defeat it.

  • Slashdot should post some test comments that include possibly unpopular but perfectly valid counter-arguments to stories or comments.

    Any mod who downranks those comments as "Troll" should be banned.
  • "We [Valve] are having trouble with our database and we need you to send your username and password so we can be sure it is you."

    This kind of phishing worked back in the AOHell days and I'm sure it still works now.

    • That's been a problem on Steam for years.

      • by fazig ( 2909523 )
        TFA has helped a lot there, I believe.
        But I remember a time where Steam would tell me to not share my login with anyone. And part of that reason was indeed because accounts got stolen, and not only because Valve doesn't want you to share your video game library. For that they introduced the Family feature which allows you to share some games with a limited number of people.
        • There are still scammers that will do things like invite you to join a tournament team and link you to a website where you'll sign up to be on a pro team (lol) by plugging in your Steam credentials and you get the rest.

          People lose a lot of accounts that way, to this day.

          • by fazig ( 2909523 )
            I suppose I don't play those games, but it sounds plausible enough to not even have me look for confirmation.
            Yeah, as it seems scammers always adapt to find a new angle of human stupidity to exploit. Seems like cybersecurity countering social engineering is going to stay in business for a long time (as long as human error is involved).

            I can think of some methods to counteract those methods and make things more fool-proof, but they'd be so privacy invading that I'm opposed to them on principle. But maybe t
  • They were playing when their antivirus scanned memory; then they got banned. Tough luck.
    • Pressing F to doubt
    • by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      You're probably right, I'm sure Valve never considered that antivirus might scan memory once and just banned everyone with antivirus

      • you make an excellent point. Probably easy to handle for this as well. If the access was for a second 1 time and then perhaps do nothing but if it's accessed many times then ban. Id give you internet points but I dont know how.
  • This reminds me of the paragraphs book that came with the original Wasteland game release. The game would refer you to a specific paragraph. The book was filled with fake paragraphs though, so if you just started reading in order to cheat you likely would find a trap that was end your game.

  • Since I think lots of players have paid DOTA accounts, even banned account should have a final bill applied for $10 to pay for the expense incurred tracking down cheaters.

  • Curious why so many cheat. When I was a kid, it was sometimes fun to cheat, but it was because you sucked at it. But now, why take all the skill out of a game? Is there a monetary reward for winning?

    Suppose this is why I don't bother with online gameplay and instead stick to single-player games where I don't have to deal with people being a million times better simply because they're cheating.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Big ego fuckups that think being able to fake it is just as good as the real thing. There are tons of these around and by far not only in multiplayer games. One reason why some people never get good at anything.

    • There are many reasons why people might enjoy chaos magic. I say magic, because, for many of these cheaters, it may as well be. Sounds like an interesting avenue for study. Maybe we'd find that many want to just role play as a "real" hacker or perhaps deserve a level of understanding because they live in countries that coin farming is a more profitable venture than physical labor or something. Reading some of these comments, I have to wonder if some people here would use violence because people, doing what
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Does this include physical sports and drug use, I mean, they're just "playing a different game by a different set of rules", right?

        In my experience, those who cheat in online competitive games are NOT more intelligent. They're assholes who get off of winning, even if they don't get to it fairly.

        Note how 40k accounts got banned for using basically the same cheating software. They aren't writing these exploits themselves. They downloading or buying them off the internet.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Given that they eventually ended up banned for violating the stated, not assumed, rule sets, I can't call it "successful". Or even a demonstration of intelligence given that it is as easy as a web search to find and download a cheat set.

            There are generally reasons for these rules. In many ways, sports are descended from warfare, and are an alternate to it. There are rules in warfare as well, with the ultimate intent there to make ending war easier.

            In a similar way, sports generally have rules to both kee

    • Curious why so many cheat. When I was a kid, it was sometimes fun to cheat

      Did you just get confused as to something you already know you did yourself?

      • These are generally paid cheats. Are kids these days really spending a pile of money each month to cheat? Crazy.

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      Because it isn't about the challenge, it is about beating people and seeing yourself above them on the boards.
  • So, then (Score:4, Funny)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Friday February 24, 2023 @11:47AM (#63320241)

    Banhammer 40,000?

  • by Outland Traveller ( 12138 ) on Friday February 24, 2023 @12:01PM (#63320299)

    As someone who has played a fair amount of online games --- I welcome this. Occasional, unpredictable honeypot traps + waves of permanent bans is a good way to go for some types of games, PvP style especially.

    If there's one thing that turns me off to a game faster than spoiled haggis, it's the presence of blatant cheaters/exploiters in a PvP game. Cheaters mess with atmosphere and can make the product look rough around the edges or unfinished, and make you question whether it's worth a time investment to explore further. Most of the time I'm much more attracted to the immersive genre of a game, and not some other, very different meta-game of exploit arms-racing.

    I also strongly prefer games with active mod communities. I'm in favor of moddable games, both offline and live. This isn't a contradiction. You can have great mod communities around a game and also be intolerant to exploits that disrupt the gameplay experience within it. If you like finding exploits/glitches/easter eggs/creative hacking, there's ways to do this and show off your skillz and creativity without becoming an asshat to everyone around you. Know where that line is, stay on the classy side.

  • This was the only game I've ever uninstalled due to a reason other than needing space on my harddrive for something else. The cheating, abusive dialogue, and generally rampant griefing was so bad that I had honestly started to think that it was somehow part of Valve's business plan for this game to cater to these types of behaviors. 40,000 accounts banned sounds like... a good start.

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