How DayZ Deals With Cheaters

[Music] okay guys uh it's really nice to see so many familiar faces uh from companies I worked for previously uh my name is Eugene Haron um I'll be talking about cheating and currently I work as associate producer on project dayy and I've been focusing on security and deployment I got a question for you how many of you cheated in the game so far can you just raise your hands cheaters nice how many of you spent money on cheats anybody interesting okay so I got a really famous tweet that that made me really popular on hacker forums and cheater forums it's called gotic hmall I called cheaters Pokémons because I was collecting them in in the band library and the basic thing about that is like it's a huge game of cat and

mouse like you're basically trying to get ahead and get those guys banned uh in in as many ways as possible and I really um found out that unhackable game is a myth I've been focusing on that for for a couple of months now and since I tried a lot of cheats over the time uh and and months not just Daisy chees like Counter Strike uh every game imaginable that was out there and and became popular in for some reason especially for cheating uh how many of you guys have cheated in a multiplayer game like sandbox or just FPS speed hacking um for example uh aimbots can just raise your hand if you try that couple of guys nice so I'm going to talk about the basics um cheating business I did a analysis on on the current state of the cheating business uh uh in really

different ways and I I'll show you over the couple of slides so what it is cheating is getting an unfair Advantage uh in a game in different ways through exploiting so it's bugs that we bring into our games that we leave them or forget about them it's cheating itself which can be done by many different ways I'll talk about that later it's scripting uh memory injections uh memory manipulation memory reading and a lot of other stuff gear and items like of the games RPGs FPS whatever the game is you get items you get gear um anything that can you can give you an advantage in the game and progress you further so people pay for services um and gear directly that can be transferred through accounts and and used in the game so who are cheaters and what's their motivation um there are creators who are actually uh guys creating the cheats now there is an interesting thing like most of the people do it for money

um I'll talk about Revenue uh a bit later but it's really interesting the amount of money people make from making cheats there are buyers who are guys who actually have money and can buy cheats uh the subscription can be pretty costly and uh you'll see it in next couple of slides as well one ofes those are cheaters who beg on forums on chats uh and they're trying to get cheats for free um so one of bees an interesting uh Cate or is Griefers like you see them uh in many other games like the toxicity in Daisy is pretty high uh you can see it in forums you can see it in in every social channel that we have at the moment and we got a got got got a couple of personal connections uh on Griefers and vandals they've been trying to wouldn't I say destroy our game but they've been trying really hard to make us look really bad and they invested a lot of time and money to do that so

sellers it became a big business so marketing is part of it uh in cheating business a big part of it is peer promotion which is reputation building we when you look at forums cheating forums chats private communities hacking forums whatever it is there is certain kind of um like social status that you build through reputation uh and use that to sell hacks and become famous in that commun community there's a lot of advertising going on you can see it on YouTube twitch Twitter I've even see couple of streamers of ours uh cooperating with cheaters so they increase their view time uh because they are actually uh behind the scenes talking to them uh so they can see effects in game get good gear and it's been a big problem as well and social engineering when somebody sells a hack he wants to sell us a hack for a reason when you're a kid and you're buying something it's probably your parents money if you're

adult it's your money and you you can do whatever you want with it and and you choose based on number of things however the big thing in in Social Engineering when marketing a cheat is creating an enemy when you whenever you visit hacking forums cheater forums or whatever it is you can see that they target something that they think is evil for example in our case it's bad Li our uh kernel agent that we Ed to protect the game big make batly into root kit which it isn't really and they make it an enemy so what they do by buying cheats is they actually fighting the big enemy The Big Brother that we are at the moment besides reputation there are a lot of features that can differentiate the cheats that you buy or sell and I'll be talking about different features in our game uh that that you can see uh being used you only know who sells cheats

those are usually guys who do it for money because it's a big business there are two ways they do it currently um or most of them subscription model so you'll buy like a subscription for a month two months a year where a guy who's on the other side or a team uh provides you with cheats for a game that you bought the subscription for the the features can change however the basic business model of that is that they enable you to cheat over a long term of time when you get banned and your license is no longer usable they always can provide another cheat although you have to buy a license so there is a revenue coming in even for for our uh for us there where do they get sold there's a big paranoia in the hacking and cheating Community I've seen a lot of website portals guys like private sellers that to

vade um leaks of their cheats keep it really simple or really complicated they sell it through IMS Skype IQs IRC forums both private and public a lot of the forums actually need a recommendation from one of the people in the forums and there's a big infiltration topic there uh that I'll talk about as well and web portals which are the big guys who actually sell sell cheats for a lot of games and they make the big bucks in general so what does it cost to buy a cheat for Day Z uh it can go from $1 a month up to 500 why do you if you cannot ask why so much there are things out there that they they keeping that they are keeping in private communities and people are willing to pay a lot of money for undetected cheats that stay there for a long time what Mak is the difference between the cheats it's features service reliability and Comm communication which

is something that I talked about before and it's about reputation when you build it up and you're a seller of a cheat you're the big guy and you can offer it to different customers and your customer base grows although we have to be really careful because when you once you become big you become a target for the developer and you're actually trying to find out how the guy does it what he actually does and how it becomes a service um as I said it is a full-time source of income there are public services and private sellers there are a lot of precautions that the guys do uh to make the cheat unusable and untransferable between guys between people so when we have a snitch in the cheating community and when he wants to sell send us a cheat it's usually Hardware ID locked it's unusable it's usually running in a VM and and a bite code and it has a lot of anti-reverse engineering protection when you when you're buying a cheat especially in Russian community

uh they use services like VK um web money and a lot of services that you don't get in Europe or are hard to get and the barrier of the language is really really a problem there so a lot of the sites require a citizen ID to buy a cheat which is really funny when you think about it they require Skype call so you will have to be uh really outspoken in their language and you have to be able to prove your identity to the guy on the Skype they require Facebook and VI account checks which is really interesting when you think about the paranoia they have and the parano is real so cheating business and numbers currently in Day Z 1 1.39% of sold licenses are banned there is a big extrapolation that I did on the data that we have from Banning and which just confirms what I said in in the in the start of the presentations once a cheater always a

cheater there's a 76% bounce rate for a guy for most of them and so when you think about it the real thing is most of those people who cheat would rather stop playing than stop cheating currently we have a total of 44,000 uh band accounts that counts for both public and private sector of uh cheater sellers in the database of cheats or a library to say uh and detection methods that we currently use there are around 400 sheets that have been sold or resold by different suppliers and different methods when you compare the numbers to other services since the business itself is growing for V bands it's 1.42 of total e accounts banned and here's the revenue numbers which is really really interesting revenue for some public sites goes up to 1.5 1.25 million a year

for that's Euros or dollars depending on the site it's a big business it's a multi-million dollar business and it's happening now with the rise of survival games uh like DayZ where a game and the gameplay mechanic is based around permanent death which is becoming a problem the gameplay experience itself really suffers when somebody's cheating you get you die you basically lose everything and you don't want to play the game anymore when it comes to public sellers in day so you contact the site for example aim junkies like I make G hexs for Daisy I want to sell through you because you have a reputation to cover you get in contact you start selling cheats you can make as much as 40K EUR a month and no problem it's like not really that hard for private sellers it's bit harder it's usually private forums IRC chats or places where you can sell the heck privately in a small

community of 10 to 50 people and they buy a subscription from you and some of those private sellers are making like 5K doar a month which is a really good income when you think about it so what cheating business means in Day Z it's gear selling we had a lot of that ESP which are Raiders that show you items and players in game uh item and player magnets so that's teleportation of items and players remote damage which is causing damage through uh uh really large distances by creating explosions or just teleporting bullets aim bols really common speed hacks common as well this is really special for da Z we're in Early Access so we're pretty buggy as well and there are loads of way to cause server crashes and a couple of guys found that out and they've been abusing that over the past couple of months crashing servers and different kind of things

so how do they cheat that's the big question when you think about it there are there are loads of ways to do it however you can categorize it in two ways there are external cheats and internal cheats there are attack vectors to inject in Windows engine through data or script or the enti itself which we had a problem recently when you want to cheat there are loads of way to do it besides buying a cheat if you want to learn by yourself there are uh great number of tutorials out there that you can use on the hacking forums cheating forums or you can ask guy when you build up a reputation and he'll tell you and give you advice how to build it up most of the people in in cheating Forum start with something that's really base they either take something from a guy and try to modify it or they go all the way when they have a programming experience and they download something from GitHub and use it to h a game when you're talking about

memory manipulation uh there are couple of programs on GitHub that do that i I've selected some of them there are more of them of course uh we're talking about xenos which is really uh really uh used a lot cheat engine used as well and by by a large number of people and more reclass memory sharp DL injector besides injecting a dll memory man which means reading or writing to a memory uh there are other ways to cheat which is usually external programs or modifying the data modifying the script that's running within the game and we have a different kind of problem with Day Z because we're a modable Sandbox game and we won't have like full conversion at one point and if that's going to happen and we're going to get there we can expect that the problem of cheating is going to become more obvious that's why we're Focus focusing on different different layers now and I'll

I'll show those layers uh in in a couple of slides when you use a dedicated application or a driver you're talking about direct memory manipulation or uh abusing gameplay script patching the data or executable or using gameplay exploits in combination with uh both those things we had couple of funny stories from from our development where they were able to create spectacular things things like tornadoes and explosions making like models almost from particle effects and there was this one guy because we have full physics system in game who actually created like a shield by injecting um arrows in the game because they have collision and created an arrow shield around this character and he was running around the game just hitting people with that shield and when you see that it's where I understand why the why the twitch streamers actually abuse that to increase their viewership contacting cheaters making spectacles using cheats

in many different ways it's almost like modding people want to try that out I had a friend who made a mod for DayZ the original one where he bu built a bat cave a proper Batcave that would open up and he would fly out with a Batmobile and just run out of that so they just want to make the spectacle work and even our Griefers and vandals they usually don't damage the game as much although there are a couple of those as well but the spectacle is a big thing there for those guys so when you have a so for example you want to cheat in game you find a way to modify xenos driver with blackbone or use cheat engine and modify your cell from GitHub you have to find a way to bypass the protection there are always vectors in the anti cheet in the windows and a lot of other things that you can use to bypass the protection nothing is perfect there is no unhackable game and and windows isn't perfect

either there's a thing called kernel pedu guard that you can see in 64-bit windows and there are loads of way to abuse it to turn it off and it doesn't even exist for for most of the versions of Windows in 32bit that's why running a kernel driver in Windows is really easy for most people out there when you set it up in in layers like what you want to do is create uh module that you can use to manipulate the memory or inject something into Data or a library of a game finding the right offsets uh in the memory so you can abuse speed of a player position of a player damage of a gun whatever it is Health invulnerability whatever it is you can use in the game to find a way to make the experience harder for other guys or make the experience better for yourself most of the cheats are combination of exploits they are based

on gameplay logic uh and when you when you get there and inject in a game they are usually for our purposes since we're modable and the script is really really powerful execution methods uh for gameplay script now there been a big part big thing in Arma communities and and and Daisy as well since we have a our own script called sqf and we're moving to other things now with the sqf you you got pretty powerful tools at your disposal uh in the original structure I I'll talk about that as well later um sqs could be could could have been abused for a lot of things and there are execution methods for our script within the game uh they enable you to even compile strings that you inject in a library or or any any part of the function uh of the original gameplay which has been a big problem for us and we're trying to proove on that that over over course of time but it's not an easy

task and it takes some time when I was thinking about the future of of hacking and cheating in games I've been on a hacking conference a couple of months ago I was discussing with the guys like what are the options Windows is improving colonal bgu guard is kind of working uh but there are still ways to hook on a process to get in there to work it out and we created a small hacking Hardware on the uh on the hacking uh conference it was a USB key 3.0 and if you don't know USB 3.0 firmware on the controller has a direct memory access so what I see in the future are a dedicated Hardware to cheat and hack really hard to detect and firmware hacks on Hardware that can access the memory if some of some of the some of the new motherboards and some of the new stuff that you can see out there

uh can be really abused by the guys that want to do it and it's not that hard when you think about it so dedicated Hardware coming for sure now the funny thing is how do we protect the game you have to consider the damage of that cheating does to your to user experience of of your players for a game like us Day Z it means a lot when you kill somebody in game it's a problem because he loses all of his progress so it's different for every other game in survival genre it's a it's a it's a huge problem what do you need to focus on is is your terms of service Ula and fair use so we can set the base of why you ban what is the license ban what is the fair use of the game and identify the core gameplay where the problems might emerge protection has to be layered I set up to talk about those layers and I try to name them as as as

as proper as I can prevention detection opusc Banning strategy and banning strategy and legal now for prevention what is prevention in our case we implemented batly agent which is a ring zero kernel agent using konel pguard and OB callback routines you can see that in a couple of other entities as well uh it's it's something really that Microsoft implemented uh for what was abused previously as UND undocumented calls by different different antiviruses and heris stics in general now when you talk about OB cback routines which is the prevention layer of making sure that you detect or prevent a hook to a game to a running model process whatever it is

besides that we use a DL wh list within the protection system that we enabled is a wide list of DLS that can be within a module of the Z or touching the module and we're trying to unlink or this hook whatever is trying to get in the process we did one more thing that's really interesting since when you talk about patchu guard which is a something that Microsoft implemented I mentioned before um we disabled running of the game in Windows test mode when you're trying to create a memory injection application or or a driver or whatever it is um usually have to if you want to get it to a current level you have to certify it and sign it now buying a certificate is not really cheap but for the guys who are making the big buck it's probably nothing but even even then uh disabling the test mode was one of the better choices that we did over over the course of the story of the Z and and our battle with

cheating because onside drivers are really easy to use and really easy to get running because you only need some programming knowledge and access to GitHub how do we detect there's loads of patterns that that you can use since the kental driver and a ring zero agent that we use at the moment you can detect through strings which means strings in running scripts that they inject engage uh names of files hackers and cheaters are really like simple people in certain sense because the reputation building is about names and being recognizable so a lot of the things they do they sign you can see their names their patterns in everything they do they use the same certificates they usually try even abusive words within the name of the certificate or name of the strings they use when you when uh in the menus that you can see in the in the cheat itself you can see driver memory patterns that you can

detect through OB callbacks as well and a couple of other Windows features which hopefully if we get the time I'll get the new technicalities um you can detect bypass vectors so there are loads of vectors between Windows that they can use to abuse the game get into memory read it inject and and change the memory those vectors usually require some kind of change within windows so we can be looking for registry entries unsp journal and a lot of other stuff that Windows uses at the moment to generate data and logs on what the user has actually done even when using OB callbacks uh and other Windows features there is a there is a big difference because these features have been designed for antiviruses and protecting uh protecting the user we're doing a different thing and it's really really a problem we're trying to make the user not do certain things and

it's not about like the antivirus which is protecting the user we're trying to suppress the user and the features that Windows has haven't been designed to do that originally however the cheating as a problem is really huge and we have to fight it somehow and this is the best way that we that we did it uh we're trying to improve it we'll see uh where it actually goes besid protecting the game and detecting any any manipulation within the data executable whatever it is you need to protect the agent itself as I said in the beginning we had a couple of injections that were based around exploits within the enti itself there are technical technicalities regarding the user mode and uh full access within the hook uh that they can abuse and to understand what we do at the moment I'll try to explain this we're trying to

protect we're trying to protect the agent and the game from reverse engineering so being able to understand what actually happens within the game uh for the for the B Li anti Che we remove part of the codes code and reintroduce them later so the cheaters can never know what's actually happening and what's changing and the obfuscation is really a big part of it we're doing live updates to game and the enti che itself and we're using authored Master server for detection and processing of the data that we get through our agent we don't want the detections be part of the client that we're running on the on the on the user PC encryption is really needed a big part of being game that's not abusable is engine architecture and server client architecture now when you look at all the other games and enti out there which is besides badly which we

use and it's amazing uh easy enti Warden that blizzard uses and a couple of other things that are either private or available uh for you to buy the client server architecture is a big part of it now you cannot trust a client it's a user PC he can do whatever he needs to do or whatever he wants to do with the PC and with the data memory processes they're running it's his and he can be bite patching all your logs he can be bitech Ing and manipulating the packets he sent he can be doing he can do anything so the agent itself is a big part of the protection the server architecture and what we recommend if you're going to implement any of it is extensive sanity checks now where there is a gameplay logic to a game you know that there are certain out outcomes that you can expect there's a logic to the game you shoot shoot the guy you aim at him you know that when you hit something the bullet cannot turn

around and and and hit something else so you are detecting changes logic changes in logic and we call it sanity checks it's something that that uh has been used for a while always consider performance and impact when you're using the client as a terminal client so the guy actually or any simulation isn't running on the client it's only uh temporary performance is a big impact there since survey is doing most of the work uh it can cause performance problems for a lot of the guys that are playing the game extensive logging it's a big part of bringing the anecdotal evidence in into our Banning strategy and logging everything that happens on the server and the client and even using fake logging on the client so cheaters have work to do because they found it they think that's our thing like how we do it and they work around it spend weeks on something that really doesn't matter never trust the client so use authorative servers when you can for a multiplayer game of any kind of sandbox

FPS or whatever it is I I was talking about protecting our agent and uh our enti cheet don't forget about protecting the game data and executable make it harder to unpack make it harder to extract offsets through op officiation consider performance as well make it harder to identify the functionality there was a if you know guys know about StarForce and how it works it created a bite code out of simple scripts that were running uh on a on a kernel level and it's something to consider when you're making something like that extract the functionality run it in different place try to obfuscate it as much as you can especially the core functionality of the game find the right balance between performance and protection everything you add cost something either on a client or a server I already mentioned that the big part of

making progress within the strategy is obfuscation use client side checks that are fake make something up so the guys have work to do within the cheating community and they are spending time on something that doesn't really matter remove it add it again just make them work for their own leave bypasses open to gather bands now when we talk about band waves and delaying the bands leaving bypasses open to gather bands is a success strategy for real people even when you when you look at the public side they start selling a cheat it starts being recognize like this is the cheat that's being used now let's buy it just wait couple wait a couple of days let them buy it ban them later just more guys you get into into ban list the better fake the detections when needed there was was this one site I'll talk about it as well cff in

Russia they are really hard in paranoia they required a citizen ID from us I talk about that uh they required a Skype call so I had to hire a Russian snitch who actually did the call for us and provided the ID and the VK account and the history of cheating but he he was willing to do that and he got money for that and there's a lot of things like that that happened over the past couple of weeks and months and band waves are one part of it so when cff did give us the hack it was Hardware ID locked so it was used only one computer we had to use any desk to connect to the computer of the guy who actually bought it do the O debug and and see what's actually happening within the cheat and what Vector they are using funny thing was that when the guys found out after band wve happened they removed the the part of the code which was a real problem for us because they are they were abusing user

mode within Windows to hook on the bat eye and the exploit within the uh enti itself but they thought that's what we detected which we weren't able to and you're not able to most of the time but they Advanced and removed the cheat and we didn't need to do anything even though it would stay undetected for a while we were hooking on a certificate that they had using delay bands is a big part for guys who are testing cheats now when you're creator of the cheat you're trying to fire bypasses scripts vectors that you can use to make it viable delay ban means so whenever somebody uses a vector that has already been detected or found as as usable Use the delayed ban just randomize it one to three days one to seven days he creates a hack starts selling it and you ban it later and it's perfect just the basic thing about ofus waste time for the creator of the cheat

make them think make them paranoia paranoic so they work a lot more on what they do and and spend time of on unnecessary things you have to be really careful about false positives they do happen be ready to uh use customer support be mindful and every case that you ban be sure that theying doing the right thing it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to Banning there are loads of ways to do it there are time B time based banss permanent banss I know a lot of games uh based on the exploit or whatever you do they use time based bands they give you give you time to cool off it wasn't the option within the Day Z because of the bounce back rate we had as I said in the beginning we had bounce back rate of 76% for people who are cheating they rather stop playing than

stop cheating so for us permanent ban was the option we ban a license usually now when Banning and when you were looking at the uh in couple of the first slides and types of cheaters like the sellers wnab bees cheaters who buy cheats and Griefers and wendals vendal are a big topic because they even though it's funny to look at the twitch stream and you see explosions everywhere and a guy running with those a around this around this body it creates a different perspective on the game and Griefers don't limit themselves to the game we had personal attacks and things happening that that actually involve law enforcement these vandals need to be stopped and in our game we do it through Hardware bands so we identify the hardware ID which can be spoofed like anything uh but we do it in a really clever way which I not will not talk about now and ban the guy uh in a really

complicated way so he's he even when he is spoofing the hardware ID spoofing the license using a different license different IP we able to find like a correlation between the data they have patterns that you can detect so those are the repeated offenders who want to damage their your game and it's really important to get them out of the picture when you're talking about cheating and and the story of Day Z when I started this it was January we had a big problem with cheating in game it became insanely huge the only thing you would see in the forums was like cheaters everywhere nothing is working just close down the game uh when you see that it's you know what's important and the first thing that you that you should do you should focus on that and make it not a thing in your game now when we implemented the agent

uh the rate of cheating has slowed down to something that we uh are able to contain and the data suggests that at most one and a half% of accounts as seen in in the in the band data are usually cheaters even when when you count the active ones or that you know are cheating but you AR unable to find the case when you're fixing the problem there are loads of people that need to get involved we're talking about legal production hiring dedicated staff and even cheaters in the community when it comes to Legal when you saw the revenue numbers that are happening within the cheating sites taking down the sites offering cheats is something that can be done it sometimes doesn't happen the the right way and they can move really quickly when they have reputation and

money to cover their s and their asses now it comes to legal and how do you do that so a lot of people within cheating business Go corporate so they are usually tax frauding and it's a big part of what you can use within legal to get on their backs and get them in jail certificate use now when I was talking about memory injection drivers and since we disabled test mode of Windows for uncertified drivers they have to use certificates they buy them we can revoke those certificates through certificate authorities for fair use and made them just pay more on use or actually use that within the case for legal when I was talking about Griefers and vandals there are loads of things that happened over past couple of weeks in regards of personal harassment Theos attacks on our service and it was a problem because we met made it personal make focusing on your game

incon inconvenient for creators and let them move on to other games now it's important to make cheat to make the cheating thing as harder as you can so that the guys who are actually trying to make money of you are not able to or it's as hard that either their skill set is not sufficient or the time investment they are that they need uh doesn't return back in on the money side from the production High dedicated staff that means programmers Community managers and cheaters and when I'm talking about cheaters I mean people within the community who are part of cheating community and can snitch for you buy you cheats send you stuff involve the community Through reporting when you talk about dedicated step I suggest that on the engine level you

focus on authoritative servers especially for multiplayer games which is what we are talking right now about and focus on network and the controller within the engine for Community managers there are three levels of infiltration that we are using currently we infiltrate hack providers sites acting as a unknown user and and the good guy who's just trying to buy a cheat we're Ting hacking forums where the private communities reside and we're acting as a nasty hacker a vandal and we're impersonating ourselves within the community Gathering their reputation getting the connections making friends that's how you get to the private sheats and the exploits which aren't mentioned anywhere when it comes to infiltrating the private communities that's where the reputation really uh is needed you need to make fake identities create fake people to get within those communities and they're really private we're talking about three to four guys who've been with each other for like years and they

usually don't let anybody uh inside their group so we have to bleed some exploits to get into those groups and once you're in you usually stay there timing is really important when you infiltrate a community as I as I said before delayed bands and band waves don't just start Banning immediately when you find out an exploit or or any problem with game wait for it and just gather some bands get some data be analytical about what you do when it time comes to community I already said make friends I have a lot of snitches within the community who report things to me and I have some really friendly relationships with them and they've helped us a lot when it comes to investigating identifying the problems

that we have and the exploits that the guys use we closed like eight of those exploits within the last month just because of snitching that's a good outcome we're talking about expanding the system besides the entity that we use besides the engine changes that we are focusing on uh rewriting the network rewriting the controller creating an authoritative system within the game making the preventional layer work accordingly we're also well thinking about let's let's make this public besides snitches and and communication through fake accounts let's give the public cheaters an opportunity to report something and get paid it's still in the making but we intend to introduce a public reward system for the people who are willing to help or just find it really really interesting to create cheats through uh servers which have disabled

protection so you get those guys to focus on Creative cheating and choose one get extensive logging on those servers and get those exploits found there's a risk to be made there of course but I think that what it what the what it actually means is extension of what I said before making friends and get those people involved within protecting their own game that they have invested so much time in get public report system out either through email or an application or web where people can report stuff they found a video a cheat and have your dedicated stuff go through that identify things that you haven't known about before and get those get into those communities uh through means necessary now there are lessons to be learned besides what I talked about so far try not to make it

personal I I made a mistake before I was stunting the guys on Twitter and different social channels and they retaliated and it's not only retaliation within the money side cheating side or they made it basically personal on their side and went on a Revenge streak which is means personal abuse and other things that happened so don't retaliate don't taunt and be aware of the repercussions that can happen now I'm going to ask you a couple of questions or you can ask me questions I'm not sure which I'm going to start with uh how much time do we have I'm not sure 10 minutes okay I'm going to leave you uh with open questions now uh who wants to ask a question okay can I get a microphone there somewhere just raise your hand if you want to ask a

question they wanted to get it recorded so I'm supposed to wait for the microphone yeah it's going to repeat it oh fine yeah just raise your hand if you want to ask a question so they can see where where to bring the microphone oh hi uh so um R any other players uh like their time is horrible but um what do you think about newer companies that are just throwing cheaters to a different server silently and just leaving them there to cheat

themselves to death or something like that yeah we actually uh since we don't have a like a single point of contact within the client you have a server browser so you can connect to any server it wasn't an option for us but when you look at Guild Wars and games which have made the officiation for cheaters really really viable I think it's an option that if you have the game that can enable something like that and you can hide it between a layer it's something that you should use for sure like put them somewhere let them play it's some something that we did we created uh cheater servers and it's really funny when you log on that server things that happened there just amazing like the spectacle cheaters fighting against cheaters like shooting insane bullets tornadoes running all over the map cars that are 10 times bigger it's just like amazing so yeah if you get the chance for sure hi um how do you think the cheat Market evolved with the rise and development of the free-to-play games which surely brought many more players into the online gaming you think this evolved and how did did it evolve the

market uh the market itself okay so um when I was doing the revenue report and the numbers that I that I shown so far I was trying to go through the people who actually went corporate and and see their tax records and and government official sites see how much tax they actually uh return uh how much money they make and I was extrapolating the data trying to uh compare it through other different sites I since I've been doing it only for a short time and and focusing on that for only really like almost maybe a year at most I've seen an increase however I wouldn't say I was there in the past uh and there haven't been too much data on it in general uh but currently I would say it's a multi-million dollar business and we see companies in the future I guess mobile and uh in general cheating for competitive games and games which have a asynchronous multiplayer synchronous multiplayer or leaderboards there's a real problem there because if it's a hook on your

game like if it's what's supposed to be making it fun the competitive aspect of the game uh you need to focus on that and there are ways to do it on mobile there are ways to do it on PC it's something that the person holds and and can do anything with it so you can expect all the things in the future as I said from Hardware hacks I can see like an add-on for a mobile that enables you to root root your phone and just root it out and get access to the memory and all part all the process is running and hack the game even on mobile hopefully that answered the question perfect any other questions yeah so do you see an interest in uh industrywide effort maybe collaborating between different Studios seeing like best practices U um sharing the name well maybe not the name of the snitches but you know like like something that goes beyond just one company each company doing its own effort in one in one side something a bit more organized industry side so it's basically the reason why I'm

here to share the data share the experience um and I I would like to see something like that although even when I was making the presentation itself I understood that I even see I I I think I I don't think I can show it so there was a like a Kickstarter that happened for a couple of cheaters they started a Kickstarter to get funds to get here in the room and troll me they didn't get the funds so they didn't go hopefully they are not here uh so I was really limiting the uh the information that I was sharing through the presentations because I know that that $500 that you need to pay to see the presentation it's enough for them and they make big bucks and it's worthwhile for them to see that and and listen to it so most of the conversation should happen in personal space so anybody who wants to ask me questions after the presentation uh it's more than welcome so any cooperation is welcome within the cheating and becoming a

multi-million dollar business it's something that we should consider for sure I have a question over here uh oh yeah perfect uh so you're hiring people from the community to basically play James Bond and spying around but doesn't that make you afraid of double agents what are you doing against that uh I usually so when I when I get into the community and infiltrate it through either one of the dedic St or me myself I usually cross check and so I have couple of snitches I cross check their information cross check their data they usually don't know about the uh each other I found a couple of liars uh I called them lying uh I didn't call them out on it because they kept supplying information but yeah double agents is a real thing um cff the side that I mentioned before um they actually prepared like a special site that only appear appeared for any of our IPS that we use within the the wepn and we thought the cheat was offline because there was no talk about it and even when

we contacted them with the fraud account the fake account they gave us a different cheat so yeah the Paran is real and double agents are a thing uh so crosschecking and getting within the communities from different vectors is important yeah one over here uh have you ever thought about baiting cheaters as in releasing your own hacks or cheats and then just Banning them yeah I actually part of the presentation mentioned um like leaving the bypasses open when I was at that point like do delaying bands and and and doing that sort of thing I was thinking about even building the reputation is based around releasing hacks so yeah it's something that I considered but I'm not going to talk about it too much I'll leave it in private okay any other questions anybody

okay so this is an extension of the double agent question um what happens when your servers are infected with um not not ideal code okay so I haven't been able to confirm any suspicion regarding that so far like there have been hxs that they built uh within the da uh where they were saying they infected servers and and such uh but I haven't found the case actually happening that uh of that happening I think it's a real possibility uh all of our game is actually running on Windows uh the dedicated servers uh it's like 2,500 of them or something like that uh so there is a possibility uh of human error of software application layer error um of getting there and and doing something

really nasty there are a couple of hxis uh that happened months ago uh and I've seen it on other games as well when you have a network engine within the game uh you need to transfer files especially for modable games and synchronization through Steam Network and uh getting the modes downloaded and there is there are always vectors to abuse that like even like sharing malware through through open channels um and even the server can be used as a rootkit in general sense for the clients running and to transfer data to those clients of running malware creating botn Nets slave Nets and such so yeah it's something that I consider and I've been focusing on security of the servers for a long time uh I've been in Sr for 10 years so yeah I'm I'm keeping an eye okay any other questions so I'm wondering why are you giving this talk publicly shouldn't be this kept private between companies so cheaters don't know how you're trying to find them I I so when you look at the

data that I shared I try to limit it as much as I can but I wanted to be here with the developers to share it some of it but most of the things that that we've done in the last six months I'll be keeping private uh so the data is real and it's recent uh but the methods as you as you have seen I I've limited it to just a couple of pointers like if you're going to do anything like we are doing at the moment I've gave pointers but haven't said the real thing uh so if you're a programmer coder and and do of you can find it and you can find the pointers and get in it um but yeah I I've limited to uh it to as less as much as less information as I can focusing on the data on things that that should help you uh uh get good at the game of of playing the K and mouse with cheaters basically okay any other question questions

yeah thank you do you use any ways based on statistics for example find IM Bots uh with um a lot of head shots mhm from sniper rifles or something like that yeah yeah it's it's a really good question so um when I was talking about sanity checks those are basically uh uh based on statistics now we haven't extended them as much as we would have or could have so far uh but I'm really working hard uh to get those things moving and get things like you mentioned right now uh in the game so I can extrapolate the data and get it uh within the anecdotal evidence for Banning lists any other questions

okay um have you been in false positive hell yet uh no we got a couple of false positives that were confirmed uh there was one outbreak but I would say it's like in tens of bands and we contained it uh so yeah false positiv hasn't been much of a problem for us so far at least good for you yeah thought about hiring a cheatah not as uh snitch but as game developer because they seem really into your game and know your game really well so I actually considered it we got a couple of CVS from cheaters even the vandals that I mentioned before um no I I wouldn't hire a cheater um the reason is we talked about it a bunch within the office uh with the guys now the problems that I see like he's been a he's been an an abusive person for a while um it's just a leak that I can't consider as a real help it's a problem and a risk and the

help that I get from them from snitching perfect I wouldn't want them in company for sure um in in terms of preventing it in the first place uh do you openly communicate any of the consequence or do you keep it more low profile not sure I understand the question so oh sorry so uh let's say you have a lot of cheaters in the game and do you mind do you think that by communicating up front some of the consequences came from cheating and the seriousness that I'm sorry for the microphone um or would you rather keep it like low profile so that other people might not be tempted to go into the cheating and uh go into be become more aware of of this community that easily provides but it's fine like I understand the question now so um we haven't been too much spoken about

the consequences of cheating because we don't have uh much much tools to besides a license ban that we can use and we haven't expanded on the on the idea yet but there's something uh to be made out of it for sure um either through sharing information or making it public uh I'm not sure like when I look at the tribunal systems within some of the games or or things when you when you when Community gets to decide what happens maybe there is something in in the public spectacle of of getting that out uh that can lower the uh initial number of Cheers or people who are willing to do that uh but I don't have the data from our game uh and even though I have spoken to a couple of other guys from companies uh those are usually private data so can't share that yet okay any questions or are we out of time even though we have question we have to stop okay perfect so thank you guys for coming and if you have any questions we can find me

uh outside and we can talk a bit more thank [Applause] you