How Riot Games is Fighting the War Against Video Game Hackers (techcrunch.com) 22
Riot Games has reduced cheating in Valorant to under 1% of ranked games through its controversial kernel-level anti-cheat system Vanguard, according to the company's anti-cheat director Phillip Koskinas. The system enforces Windows security features like Trusted Platform Module and Secure Boot while preventing code execution in kernel memory.
Beyond technical measures, Riot deploys undercover operatives who have infiltrated cheat development communities for years. "We've even gone as far as giving anti-cheat information to establish credibility," Koskinas told TechCrunch, describing how they target even "premium" cheats costing thousands of dollars.
Riot faces increasingly sophisticated threats, including direct memory access attacks using specialized PCI Express hardware and screen reader cheats that use separate computers to analyze gameplay and control mouse movements. To combat repeat offenders, Vanguard fingerprints cheaters' hardware. Koskinas admits to deliberately slowing some enforcement: "To keep cheating dumb, we ban slower." The team also employs psychological warfare, publicly discrediting cheat developers and trolling known cheaters to undermine their credibility in gaming communities.
Beyond technical measures, Riot deploys undercover operatives who have infiltrated cheat development communities for years. "We've even gone as far as giving anti-cheat information to establish credibility," Koskinas told TechCrunch, describing how they target even "premium" cheats costing thousands of dollars.
Riot faces increasingly sophisticated threats, including direct memory access attacks using specialized PCI Express hardware and screen reader cheats that use separate computers to analyze gameplay and control mouse movements. To combat repeat offenders, Vanguard fingerprints cheaters' hardware. Koskinas admits to deliberately slowing some enforcement: "To keep cheating dumb, we ban slower." The team also employs psychological warfare, publicly discrediting cheat developers and trolling known cheaters to undermine their credibility in gaming communities.
This sort of thing (Score:3)
The sort that when I hear of I think, "JFC man, if you'd spend half that effort on just learning the material you'd get an A without being a cheating piece of shit."
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People are cheating you. The the real laziness is the examiners who are too lazy to identify the students that are cheating. It doesn't matter what you do, someone is attempting and likely succeeding in cheating you. The only question is if you're good enough to identify it.
Re: This sort of thing (Score:1)
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This is an examiner and structure of the test issue. Examiners are lazy/desire efficiency, and want something easy to grade. So they reuse a lot of questions, and even whole tests.
Gaming cheating is the opposite. Every game is different so active effort must be made by both cheat creators and anti-cheat makers to adapt to each other constantly. Also pretty much everything relevant is remote only, so games effectively have to operate in uncontrollable hardware and software environment. Unlike tests, where yo
Police state methods (Score:2)
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But they can they sell the "tech" back to the state, which is potentially yuge, man.
Re:Police state methods (Score:4, Insightful)
over a f.... video game???
You sound like the type of person who thinks that video games remain something you play on your Nintendo on your home TV, rather than something that has a ranked league, sponsored teams, contests with actual real world money to be made, etc.
You sound like the type of person who would dismiss the idea that trolls and idiots who cheat for the lulz are just kids being kids rather than a group who are actively making a a game less fun to play for others and by extension less popular and directly affecting the bottom line of the company who is producing it.
Cheating in some games has real world consequences. Notice there's no kernel level anti-cheat systems in single player games? What people do on their own system is their business. When they affect others, especially those with financial interests, expect the big guns to be brought out.
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Video games are exactly home TV entertainment. You're an idiot company for offering money for those antics.
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Video games are exactly home TV entertainment. You're an idiot company for offering money for those antics.
And round balls are just to kick around in your garden. You're an idiot for paying to see someone do it, leagues are idiots for expecting people to want to watch it, teams are idiots to pay people to do it professionally. yadda. yadda. yadda. Have you ever watched the Superbowl? That is also home TV entertainment for most people.
The reality is that there are professional leagues in Valorant. The reality is your entertainment on a gaming platform is related to your experience, and cheaters ruin that experien
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I imagine it eont be but a few more years before Fanduel betting starts cashing in on eSports.
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Online multiplayer video games are the bleeding edge of security technology. I can almost certainly bet that World of Warcraft had 2FA a solid 5-10 years before your bank did.
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Wow came out like a decade after my bank at the time had 2fa.
Sure at first it was over telnet and phone lines so it wasn't terribly secure at first..
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Bullshit. This is just malware propaganda (Score:1)
Kernel level anticheat is inherently insecure and inherently dangerous. It is by definition malware in and of itself, and is a growing vector for other malware to spread to systems infected with it. They're lying about something nobody can disprove to try and normalize the idea of giving some of the most incompetent, untrustworthy, and malicious corporations out there kernel level access to people's computers just to run a video game. It's the same as why they go out of their way to sing the praises of mali
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Yes inherently its just running on the customers computer anyway, so they don't actually have control.
Not sending other players locations when not necessary etc would be cooler.
And you can cheat by off-device means anyway, you can do an aimbot that doesn't run any code on the computer now.
Network lag and game world prediction (Score:2)
Not sending other players locations when not necessary etc would be cooler.
The extremely hard part is predicting when it would suddenly become necessary.
Networked games have inherent lag that is compensated and cheated around:
What you see on your own screen is supposed to be "the now", but is based around informations that was sent to you be the server a few ticks ago, and its own view of the world is based on pings that your adversaries sent a few fractions of blinks before. You screen is based on slightly outdated information.
The art of good network game code is hiding these inc
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I don't install the stuff on my computers, so it could be presumed I'd agree with you, but instead of making a rational argument you loaded it down with dishonest hyperbole where you apply a pejorative label, and then use that to imply the software does something different than what they say.
Hardware DRM exists all over the place. It's stupid and I avoid it, but that doesn't make it "malicious."
Surely the stuff that you mention as "going the way of the dodo" died, or is dying, also because of prevalent chea
Turn based (Score:2)
And chess, which is competitive but where the types of cheating that work can also be detected server-side by post-game analysis.
Also chess is turn based.
So it's not afflicted by the need to balance between the server sending enough information to compensate for network lag in a fluid manner versus sending too much information and the players being able to infere information about their adversary that wouldn't be able just from the screen informations, as real-time action games are.
Chess is, as your mention, entirely based around secretly augmenting the decision making process of a player, which is indeed an entirely different can of