PC Gaming @lemmy.ca alessandro @lemmy.ca 1 wk. ago

'I had my fun' says hacker who used Call of Duty anti-cheat exploit to ban 'thousands upon thousands' of innocent players

www.pcgamer.com 'I had my fun' says hacker who used Call of Duty anti-cheat exploit to ban 'thousands upon thousands' of innocent players

Catching strays.

59 comments

But you know, according to EA Linux is worse than guys like this deliberately causing disruptions in service to legit players.
That kernel level anti-cheat is really working out well, eh?
- Kernel level isn’t about stopping cheaters, it’s about gaining system access
  
  Naw, it's about pretending to stop cheaters. It's security theatre, same as the TSA
  
  To what end?
  
  And about putting a buzzword on your game that makes people think they're safe from cheaters
  
  Source?
Honestly, not even mad. Sucks for the victims, but we need hackers poking holes in kernel anticheats. Show the game companies that kernel anticheat is a waste of effort and maybe this horrific plague of gaming will die off.
- Another option is for gamers to quit buying this softslop
  
  It's inevitable. You can't make progress without several steps back.
- The issue is that without it cheating is so much easier in many games. So then people just get pissed at all the hackers.
  
  No, not really. That's the point. Kernel level anticheat has no real advantages and is easily bypassed. It's the laziest possible solution that only detects and blocks the laziest possible implementations of cheats.
  
  Good game design eliminates the possibility of cheating. Cheats are only ever possible if you take enough stupid and lazy shortcuts that it's easy to take advantage.
  
  Yes, if they offload all of the compute for anti-cheat to the customer's hardware, then you are right for current operating systems.
  
  Client side anti-cheat is not the only way but it is the cheapest way for the game industry.
Vizor explained that Ricochet uses a list of hardcoded strings of text to detect cheaters and that they then exploited this to ban innocent players by simply sending one of these strings via an in-game whisper. To test the exploit the day they found it, they sent an in-game message containing one of these strings to themselves and promptly got banned.

Vizor elaborates, "I realized that Ricochet anti-cheat was likely scanning players’ devices for strings to determine who was a cheater or not. This is fairly normal to do but scanning this much memory space with just an ASCII string and banning off of that is extremely prone to false positives."

This is insane, they had an automatic script to connect to games and ban random people on loop so they could do it while away
- a list of hardcoded strings
  
  Violating a core programming tenet right off the bat. I wonder how much money Activision payed for this software...
  
  We and the hacker have no idea if this list is config driven or truly "hard coded" i.e. a const in the source code. It's hardly an indicator of violating a core programming tenet.
So, simply receiving "aim bot" as a whisper (private) message was enough to get permabanned. FUCKING JEE-NIUS ANTICHEAT, GREAT JOB, GUYS!!!
This is kinda punk 🤔
- Shitting your pants is punk, too.
  
  All the punkest punks shit their pants.
  
  If hacking call of duty is cool, consider me miles davis
  
  I thought that was the gas station hotdog.
  
  GG Allin!
Is stopping cheaters in most video games even possible?
- It requires the server to verify all inputs. It's doable, path of exile does that and most arpgs. But it leaves them very open to lag and desync issues, most games will prioritize a smooth experience.
  
  Cod is peer to peer I think, clients host the server, very cheap for the company. But obviously you need to give the client a lot more information.
  
  I doubt COD is peer to peer anymore. Maybe like 10 years ago. No way they are giving up that much control over the game
  
  What about things that only need to be done client side, like wallhacks?
- When I was at my peak effectiveness in Urban Terror, I could hold my own against them...
  
  Heh. GTA V used to be fun even when a cheater would show up and because you could just use a rocket launcher on them to keep them ragdolled forever so they couldn't use their cheat menu (or any menu). They'd have to alt-F4 to quit since being ragdolled closes any open menus.
- Yes, but not through standard methods. Even AI aimbot can be filtered, but the amount of RND required is likely to much for a single studio to bear alone. I believe we are more likely to see neural network trained bots largly replacing real players using an off the shielf model. Just a guess, not an expert.
  
  There is already a solution using relatively simple analytics and building a profile of the player. It becomes very easy to find cheaters because it is easy to analyze how fast and directionally they aim. It is obvious when someone is using macros for instance or a aimbot.
  
  The problem is this does not require intrusive programs that are essentially spyware for your OS. This is what attracts the big studios to these solutions not their effectiveness.
  
  There is a workable solution but let's be honest. Cheaters are often whales and spend a lot of time and money on the game. It is bad engagement to send them away.
  
  Big studios already recognize this. So to be blunt they allow a certain amount of cheating because they don't want to really solve the problem.

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