Counter Strike player gets thousands of cheaters banned by releasing fake hacks

midian182

Posts: 9,632   +120
Staff member

If you’re a fan of multiplayer online games, then you’ll know that the worst thing about the genre, other than toxic players, is the cheating. And one game series that’s seen more than its fair share of cheaters is Counter-Strike. This unfairness prompted one ingenious Redditor to create a number of fake hacks for the shooter, acting as a honeypot for cheaters who would then get banned by Valve’s Anti-Cheat system (VAC) on Steam.

User AndroidL’s fake ‘multihacks’ for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive promised everything from wallhacking, to aimbots, to bunnyhops, to extreme lean angles. This attracted a lot of would-be cheaters to try out the hacks, but what they didn’t know was that the releases “had a ‘timer’ in them which meant the features that instantly banned them would only be activated after a certain time.” The final fake hack that AndroidL put out, which was downloaded over 3500 times, instantly banned anyone who opened it and joined a game.

In the end, AndroidL’s work was viewed over 26,000 times and received over 5500 downloads. The Reddit user even posted screenshots of some of the people who downloaded the hacks complaining about being banned or having their accounts marked as untrustworthy.

By using a service that estimates VAC bans over time, AndroidL showed the effect his releases had on the number of CSGO bans (below).

The fake hacks were so successful that AndroidL has promised this won’t be the last time we’ll see them. "I'll look into doing this sort of thing again,” he said. Hopefully, all this will make anyone looking to gain an unfair advantage in a multiplayer game think twice about cheating.

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Those hackers definitely got what they deserved, but I still don't appreciate this type of vigilantism.
 
This guy is awesome. I'm sick of cheating in games. I'll never understand why people can't ever just play the game for what it is. I've been playing Counter-Strike (on and off) since 1999 and never even considered cheating. The Division Beta just got swarmed by cheaters in the last day and half too and it made things really annoying to play in the Dark Zone. I would love to have more programmers take this matter into their own hands and get more and more people banned for this.
 
Those hackers definitely got what they deserved, but I still don't appreciate this type of vigilantism.
It's hilarious... like any program you download online, you are taking a risk. It's far better this than their social, credit card, personal info being pulled from their computer and sent to a hacker database for sale now isn't it?
 
When people have to do something like this it shows how bad their anti-cheat is. It's actually this easy to get real cheats for CSGO. Game is filled with cheaters since last sale.
 
Ok this guy doesn't understand that VALVE wants people to cheat so they can get banned and make more money!! All this guy did was to make the people that used the cheat and got caught rebuy the game.

1. Buy new game for 15$ this is cheap for any cheater.
If the game is so popular then why sell it for 15$ (Holidays sells for 3-7$)
2. Create new account!
3. Start playing again.

This guy didn't even hit a drop in the bucket.

VALVE rips everyone off buy letting the community Create the maps, weapon skins and music packs GET THIS! and then Sells them to you. ROFL dumbest people in the world.
So the players make the game and buy their own game LOL.

The overwatch system- Community based viewing of reported cheaters -Again community (the everyday common player) is the ones who view the videos and report if these people are cheating. Valve is running to the bank with your cash.

Also all the money they make from case keys, map packs and skins what have they given back to the community NOTHING . yas did all the work they robbed you and shows nothing in return
 
Ok this guy doesn't understand that VALVE wants people to cheat so they can get banned and make more money!! All this guy did was to make the people that used the cheat and got caught rebuy the game.

1. Buy new game for 15$ this is cheap for any cheater.
If the game is so popular then why sell it for 15$ (Holidays sells for 3-7$)
2. Create new account!
3. Start playing again.

This guy didn't even hit a drop in the bucket.

VALVE rips everyone off buy letting the community Create the maps, weapon skins and music packs GET THIS! and then Sells them to you. ROFL dumbest people in the world.
So the players make the game and buy their own game LOL.

The overwatch system- Community based viewing of reported cheaters -Again community (the everyday common player) is the ones who view the videos and report if these people are cheating. Valve is running to the bank with your cash.

Also all the money they make from case keys, map packs and skins what have they given back to the community NOTHING . yas did all the work they robbed you and shows nothing in return
By your way of thinking every game dev makes a fool of their community by letting them create mods and maps.
Just for your knowledge, nobody is forcing you to pay for any skins, you get a lot of free ones and I probably made back all of the money I paid for CS:GO by just selling the skins I got for free.
Servers are also free, community created maps are free, new game modes (mods) are free. What else do you want? Do you honestly think that they are banning people just to make them rebuy the game? That's the most childish reason I've ever heard.

Your "Valve is scamming us" way of thinking has so many flaws that it can be considered completely irrational.
 
Absolutely LOVE this and hope more people join in the fight against cheaters. They are nothing but common criminals akin to a petty thief, they steal the fun from playing games online. I've been playing games online for over a decade and cheaters have ruined every game I've played. I have literally banned thousands of players over the years.

I hope the next fake cheat finds a way to crank to CPU vcore so high it fries their CPU!
 
Now if they could only make this for Xbox One and PS4 that would be great. There are hard working people who love to take a break and play some video games to relax, but instead of relaxing you have people who lack in skill that want to use hacks and cheats. Its almost to the put that video game companies like this allows these things to happen so that they do not lose money. Honestly if you had a software to banned people like this, then it would teach a lesson and you probably would gain more profit because it would be more user friendly. IDK just my opinion.
 
Absolutely LOVE this and hope more people join in the fight against cheaters. They are nothing but common criminals akin to a petty thief, they steal the fun from playing games online. I've been playing games online for over a decade and cheaters have ruined every game I've played. I have literally banned thousands of players over the years.

I hope the next fake cheat finds a way to crank to CPU vcore so high it fries their CPU!

I completely agree with you, there are several times I have sat here and wonder why I gave Android, Xbox and Playstation my money when they make NOO effort to ban cheaters. I am a little older and I tell my friends all the time that these people could not survive in the Nintendo era because hacks really didn't exist and if they did it was used very little. Show true skills and stop being a bunch of over privilege kids that do not know how to take a lose.
 
Those hackers definitely got what they deserved, but I still don't appreciate this type of vigilantism.
If the authorities won't do anything about it, you take the law into your own hands... Just sayin'.

The United States of America was founded by people that took the law into their own hands and stopped being cowards relying on others to protect them. Had it not been for those people, we would not be sitting here complaining about cheaters in the first place.

It is everyone's responsibility to protect the greater good. Being lazy or cowardly to the point of ignoring someone doing something you know is wrong, is demonstration of your lack of being an intelligent and strong person.

When I was in OGL competitive play in Counter-Strike 1.0 around the time when steam was first being released... I ran my own servers, and nothing irritated me more than to have to spend a few hours to a day cleaning up my servers instead of practicing with my team for competition.

The mentality of cheating in games is the based on that person's lack of intelligence and strength of character. They go through life doing the least possible effort, pushing things on others to take care of them, and can't figure out simple problems (hence why they cheat, too lazy and incompetent to learn how to do it like the better players).

As a programmer, I wanted to do this fake cheat release myself many times, though my code would have done more than got them banned, so that's why I didn't release it... because I would not be able to control myself, cheaters are like those dumb people you see teasing sleeping lions or panthers and laughing until they get what they pushed for... smacked like the b*tches they are.
 
Cheating takes the fun out of the game and a sense of accomplishment. The point is to use your knowledge, talent, and skill to win within a set range of parameters. On the flip-side of coin, a game could be made so difficult, that it wouldn't be fun. Only losers cheat. And in all likely hood, the same couldn't be trusted in life on general matters.
 
Well, I sure have no sympathy for these people, regardless of whatever their argument is. Hacking is hacking, no matter how "minimal" you think it is (ex. radar vs wallhack or aimbot).

Hope to see more of this!
 
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I'm happy that cheating is being discouraged. But, on the other hand, I don't like that so many players are being vac banned. Van doesn't just ban you from playing the game you were cheating on, it bans you from all multiplayer games on Steam. That's over-kill. I don't want people to cheat but I also don't want them banned. What we really need is to prevent cheating from happening in the first place. Servers can prevent wall hacks by blocking location data between players who have no line of sight. And clients can defeat bots by include them in the game by default. Accuracy, damage and other effects like projectile spread can then be processed on the server based on distance between players and some virtual dice rolls, similar to how it's handled in RPGs. Of course this means giving up manual aim but that is the unavoidable trade-off.
 
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