Besides, sowing discontent is a tried and true propaganda strategy.
The question is: who coughs up the money for developing these cheats? Some of these, particularly the PCIe hardware rootkits, take a lot of money, time and skilled people to develop - and it is not too far fetched to assume that a nation state has been of assistance here.
Others openly flout their allegiance to Russia like the MIG-Switch developers, a ton of "bulletproof hosters" use Russian ASNs and/or are based in Russia, malware automatically disables itself when it detects indications of being in Russia... I can explain the latter away as "don't shit where you eat", but the others? There's no way there aren't direct links between the Russian government and the criminal actors. At the very least there must be some sort of "tacit approval".
Government officials and security researchers play videogames too, after all… sure, we’d hope they’d have good computer self defense. But it is a fishing expedition and all that.
Now is a kerbal level anti-cheat overkill? Hard to say from the outside but it does seem like installing a steel vault for your door. While the window is still right there as normal.
i was simply explaining that these studios don't need perfect security to accomplish their missions.
Cheaters currently use entirely second PCs, or other extremely complicated methods of cheating, and are still getting caught.
Security isn't "for nothing", you make it as expensive as possible for cheaters/adversaries to win, and then keep raising the bar, to make the majority of users safe and secure.
CS2 is entirely unplayable now due to hackers. I’m told Valorant isn’t much better. There’s probably just no solution unless you design your game to not benefit from hacking (e.g. Hearthstone, MTG)
Though as I understand the amount of cheaters in both games varies based on how high/low in the ranked rating you are.
> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”
But if you read the article they do have some way to detect (some) DMA based hacks too where the actual cheat runs on a different computer and use DMA through a pci-express card to read/write directly into memory.
> “I think we detect the majority of it today, but it’s kind of iterative,” said Koskinas.
Though most cheaters "rage cheating" after losing really badly and using cheats to "get back" and those are much easier to detects. This kind of "download random cheat from the internet" at the best only get you banned and at worst your computer is super duper hacked (you are effectively manually downloading a virus and manually giving it admin/kernel level access)
> Thanks to all these techniques and strategies, most cheaters can now be roughly divided into two categories. The first, representing the majority of cheaters, is made up by those who are “rage cheating” by using cheap tools that are easy to detect. Riot employees sarcastically call these cheats “download-a-ban,” according to Koskinas.
At the end of the day all I know from my own experience is that the difference in the amount of cheaters I run into between Counter Strike and Valorant is massive and the main claimed difference being kernel level stuff in Valorants anti cheat (or Valve is just really really bad at making anti cheats)
Someone figured it out and used my account to cheat in counter strike. Valve banned the account one week (!!) later. Now the account can not be used to play their competitive games anymore. Needlessly to say it was a lifetime ban.
To this day I keep wondering how they can fk this up so bad. Why I am even allowed to play CS without 2fa enabled and without Email confirmation for the first login? They also failed to block the login from Thailand despite it's creation in Germany. This could have been so easily prevented.
Not sure if they fixed this yet. Otherwise you have your answer, why there so many more cheaters. It is not just the kernel extension. The most basics are not in place.
This is because any barrier to playing the game is also effectively a barrier for someone to buying their lootbox crap.