What is the genius idea that eradicated cheaters in FPS games?
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At the time of writing, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO), which is distributed on the PC gaming platform Steam as an upgraded version of Counter-Strike 2 , is an FPS that has been loved by gamers for many years since its release in 2012. The founder of a famous game server has revealed how he eradicated the cheats that were rampant in CSGO with his excellent ingenuity.
How we Outsmarted CSGO Cheaters with IdentityLogger - Mo Beigi
https://mobeigi.com/blog/gaming/how-we-outsmarted-csgo-cheaters-with-identitylogger/
The idea behind eliminating CSGO cheaters was revealed by software engineer Mo Beigi. Beigi is the founder of the CSGO community server 'Invex Gaming' based in Australia and New Zealand, which was active from 2014 to 2019.
Invex Gaming gained popularity through the quality of its community, but like most online gaming communities, it was plagued by malicious cheaters.
At the time, Beigi and his team's approach to anti-cheating relied on human analysis of all in-game activity 24/7, and then banning players from their accounts as soon as they were found cheating. But this approach had limitations.
The basic mechanism for banning cheaters is as follows: When a cheater is discovered, the server administrator registers both the 'IP address' and 'Steam ID' on the server. Then, when the cheater accesses the server again, the IP address and Steam ID are checked, and if either is on the blacklist, the connection is denied.
This double-check method can help if a cheater switches Steam accounts and changes their Steam ID, or if they use a VPN to spoof their IP address, but it doesn't help if they change both their Steam ID and their IP address.
One particularly notorious cheater was found to be using an infinite number of IP addresses and over 87 Steam accounts spread across the globe to cheat in CSGO, resulting in a cat-and-mouse game between the server administrators and the cheats.
So Beigi, a member of the open source modding platform SourceMod and an expert in reverse engineering CSGO, came up with the idea of using the game's built-in browser.
CSGO has a browser called the 'VGUI browser,' which server administrators use to display rules and announcements to players visiting the server.
The VGUI browser works with Steam cookies, and unlike common browsers such as Google Chrome, which have set expiration dates for cookies, it can also store cookies with expiration dates of more than 10 years. Moreover, the VGUI browser can secretly direct players to specific websites and collect data without displaying a window, and there is no function to erase cookies.
In other words, if the tracking ID using this cookie is used as a cheater's identifier, it will be possible to detect cheaters even if they switch IP addresses and Steam IDs. Technically, it is possible to avoid bans by reinstalling CSGO or manually deleting the locally stored cookie files, but few cheaters were willing to do so every time they were caught.
When Beigi and his team implemented this technique in February 2017, it was extremely effective, and the number of cheaters being banned on Invex Gaming immediately skyrocketed.
Along the way, some well-known and trusted members of the community over the years were found to have secret cheating accounts, cheaters contacted Beigi asking for information on how he detects cheats, and the site garnered attention from other server administrators, some of whom offered to pay Beigi for the technology.
However, Beigi never leaked this technique to anyone, only sharing it with another server administrator he trusted completely, because if anyone knew how he was detecting cheats, they would be able to circumvent it quickly.
In this way, Beigi's Invex Gaming became known as a 'server that is difficult to cheat,' and both cheaters and reports of cheating decreased significantly until the in-game browser was discontinued in October 2017 for security reasons.
'Even after all these years, I'm still really proud of the solution and how it worked,' Beigi recalled.
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in Game, Posted by log1l_ks