[meibo]

To be even remotely safe from this, you need to use a kernel driver, which is invasive and widely seen as unacceptable - at the moment anyhow.

See Riot and Valorant from earlier this year. There was a lot of outcry and the response from the devs was basically "we don't give a damn".

Other games, for example, scan window titles or signature for a variety of debuggers/hacking tools like IDA and x64dbg. There's many techniques and variations you can apply to make things like this more "annoying" - but never impossible.

Earlier this year, there was a PCI card PoC that would read memory and act as an "undetectable" wallhack - people are clearly crafty enough to always find their way around.

[silicon2401]

Is there a way to check what games/platforms install kernel drivers? I recently installed trackmania and after jumping through what felt like 10 hoops just to play the game (log in to epic, download epic games store, log into ubisoft, etc etc), I realized I have idea how much stuff is being installed on my pc after all these steps.

[smileybarry]

Most recent games install their anticheats from their own folder, so if you open something like Process Explorer and look at the loaded drivers list, you could tell by the path.

However, AFAIK nearly all games with anti-cheat (save for Valorant of course) load their anti-cheat when the game starts and unload it when the game closes. You can run something like Process Explorer/Monitor before running the game, then notice what drivers & services it's loading.

[tschwimmer]

There was backlash about Riot's Vanguard but I feel it was mostly driven by the gaming media as the vast majority of consumers don't understand the nuance of userspace vs kernelspace.

I'd expect more developers begin to deploy kernel-level anticheat in the future.

[tester34]

>There was a lot of outcry and the response from the devs was basically "we don't give a damn".

Because "we" gamers tend to prefer to have fair game

Playing against cheaters destroys fun and the games itself.

It's hard trade off, but your average gamer would rather to play fair game.

[meibo]

I don't think you can attribute this universally to "gamers" - there's a lot of games that don't have obvious hacking problems by employing various other measures which aren't as invasive.

I'd call myself a "gamer" and would never install something like Valorant - and most of my friends didn't either. Some of us value our privacy more than getting rid of the one hacker we get per week.

[tester34]

>Some of us value our privacy more than getting rid of the one hacker we get per week.

oh c'mon.

It's heavily dependent on the game.

There's different % of cheaters in CS, in LoL, in Tibia and a lot of other games.

e.g there isn't a lot of cheaters in LoL because (besides other) cheats do not have as huge impact there as in other games like shooters.

On the other hand cheats in Tibia are just bots that exp for people whole days (in majority of the cases; at least before BattleEye).

>Some of us value our privacy

Installing and running giant program which can do shitton of crazy things under the hood already says that I trust enough that vendor.

Unfortunely their soft does not need kernel level permissions in order to be dangerous to my privacy, so what's the exactly difference?

All they have to do in order to compromise my privacy would be just sending screen shoots to the cloud that I'm writting snarky comments on HN.