Game developer Valve has announced that it permanently banned more than 40,000 accounts for using cheating software to gain an unfair advantage over other players in the Dota 2 game.
The cheat gave players access to internal client app information that is not visible during normal gameplay, thus obtaining a competitive advantage.
Dota 2 is a popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game. It has a professional competition scene with numerous tournaments and leagues for all playing levels.
Success in Dota 2 relies on strategic thinking, quick reflexes, and teamwork.
An unhealthy competitive spirit pushes some players to seek alternative means to gain an advantage over their opponents, and there's an entire industry of third-party cheats that accommodates that demand.
To maintain a fair playing environment for everyone to enjoy, it is crucial for Valve to identify and stop the use of these cheats as quickly as possible.
Setting up a honeypot
In this case, Valve developed a patch that acted as a honeypot, catching requests on areas that shouldn't be queried or monitored by the gaming app.
"This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits," Valve explains.
After the Dota 2 gaming community applied the patch, which is a mandatory requirement to join multiplayer games, it was revealed that over 40,000 accounts were using the cheating software.
This makes it one of the most prevalent cheats ever seen in the game's history.
Valve says it decided to publicize this crackdown case, which is just one of the many they carry out in its effort to fight cheaters, to pass a clear message to all players, including professionals who take part in official Valve events, that using software to read data from the client during playtime will result in permanent account bans.
It should be noted that game cheats are often a threat as they can also infect players’ computers with info-stealing malware and cryptocurrency miners.
At the start of this month, security researchers discovered malicious Dota 2 game modes on Steam, which exploited a flaw in the game to infect players with malware.
Comments
GT500 - 1 year ago
I can't remember the last time I heard Valve do anything about cheating.
h_b_s - 1 year ago
"I can't remember the last time I heard Valve do anything about cheating."
If you're hearing about it, it's because the campaign is over and they're moving on to other tactics and tools. What, do you expect Valve to tell you what they're doing so anyone with the skills can bypass it? Don't be so naive.
What's continually eye-rollingly stupid is the number of people that have such fragile egos they have to cheat at games like this.
GT500 - 1 year ago
Most companies at least publish notifications about how many people they have banned, and about new anti-cheat tech they have developed. Most of what I hear is Valve is sitting there doing nothing as cheaters take over their games.
NoneRain - 1 year ago
I think Valve does less than other companies about anti cheats.
There are major well known cheats that have being working for years on CS GO.
You could, right now, buy a subscription and be invisible to VAC, and as long as you don't get reported consecutively, you're good.
I mean, as other companies also struggle against it, just some make that much money, or have that many players. Valve should at this point should be the reference against cheaters, but is quite the opposite...
GT500 - 1 year ago
That's sort of the impression I got as well, that Valve just didn't do much about cheaters in their games. It seemed like they developed their VAC, and then just left it to rot for more than a decade. It seemed more like they wanted to rely on their policy of banning people at a random moment some time after they were detected cheating to scare people into not cheating than to actually try to develop and maintain a good anti-cheat system.