| I built my initial programming/security skills by making PC game cheats, and now that I'm actually working in the software industry on other stuff I decided at the beginning of quarantine to see if I could still do it. Specifically, I targeted PUBG. They've added obfuscation, that's about it. Even one of the guys the author interviews admits it: > “Last year, we spent time working on various measures to block cheat programs,” explains Taeseok Jang, executive producer of PUBG PC. “Most of these actions focused on blocking cheat program developers to make it more difficult for them to create these highly lucrative cheats.” That obfuscation was probably a huge problem when PUBG initially started adding it, but so long as some bored high school kid has a pirated copy of IDA and a desire to prove themselves, that info is going to end up online. Each new obfuscation feature or anticheat detection becomes a challenge, and the results of that challenge being inevitably solved are inevitably posted in a public and high-visibility place for others to learn from and use. All of this public information meant that creating a cheat for the game probably added around a month or two of work to adapt to the cheat prevention efforts, on top of the month or so that I spent looking for the actual in-game structures necessary to implement the radar I was going for. I already expected every hindrance I encountered when reversing the game and writing the tooling to interact with the game's process. It was still daunting, especially since I had never touched the windows kernel until this project, but ultimately when I ended up getting everything working it felt like I was just using the same techniques I used to use back in the day only with extra steps. My takeaways for anyone interested in preventing videogames from being cheated in: - Cheaters will eventually find a way, but you can always reduce the quantity and quality of them.
- All information on how to write a cheat for your game eventually ends up in public forums. Keep an eye on those and learn how most people are writing cheats and target those methods specifically.
- Obfuscation (new detentions, new anti-reversing measures, new countermeasures to cheating methods) buys you time in the immediate term and invalidates existing online information in the long term. They're like antibiotics--they increases the barrier to entry and pain factor of cheating only if you continue adding/changing it.
- Obfuscation will never be adequate to prevent cheating entirely. Human monitoring, ML, skill-based pairing, and full visibility & control over hardware the game is executing on are probably the next generation in terms of cheat prevention.
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> - Cheaters will eventually find a way, but you can always reduce the quantity and quality of them.
> - All information on how to write a cheat for your game eventually ends up in public forums. Keep an eye on those and learn how most people are writing cheats and target those methods specifically.
> - Obfuscation (new detentions, new anti-reversing measures, new countermeasures to cheating methods) buys you time in the immediate term and invalidates existing online information in the long term. They're like antibiotics--they increases the barrier to entry and pain factor of cheating only if you continue adding/changing it.
> - Obfuscation will never be adequate to prevent cheating entirely. Human monitoring, skill-based pairing, and full visibility & control over hardware the game is executing on are probably the next generation in terms of cheat prevention.