Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)
codeneverdies.github.io
codeneverdies.github.io
After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through walls and auto-fire as soon as they entered my crosshair.
I obviously only tried it out on an alt steam account for fear of the infamous VAC ban, but no such ban happened. I only toyed with it for a few weeks as I then grew disinterested but that definitely left a sour taste in my mouth for the "effectiveness" of VAC if a script kiddie like me at the time could throw together something custom in just a few hours, I'm sure it'd be much easier now with ChatGPT...
There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.
Seeing that the cheating industry is relatively large, and functions on a subscription basis; For the vast majority of cheaters the challenge is entering their credit card to get their cheat subscription.
These are people who want to win at all costs, other users be damned.
A bit, sometimes, maybe, for some. The only person you really need to compete with is your past you. The rest... it certainly leads to less happy life, unless you keep winning way more often than the rest.
And uncontrolled, it can very easily spiral into rather destructive personality patterns over time. Parents often fuck up their kids having them compete as much as possible, laying seeds for later issues. Competitive people always compare themselves to others, never happy with what they have, regardless of how much they achieved. Literal opposite of searching for happiness in life.
I don't know about your peers but I see this behavior often in high performance environment, high achievers with sad inner lives.
Cheating is "this is my actual skill level if there wasn't so much bullshit happening to me"
Of course this is all a lie, but it's what they tell themselves.
For the people who make them it's an intellectual exercise, like solving a puzzle, it's an end in itself. That and the social credit it gives you among your technical friends.
I remember trying to hack the levelling-up mechanism on Crysis 2 - it worked by sending your post-game stats (client-side) to a master server, so editing those stats in memory before that happens would work (there seems to be no tracking of stats on the game server side - even though they could've had the game server relay that to the master server).
Memory is fuzzy but I think I managed to level up to a stage where I got the weapons I wanted. For my defense this kind of "cheating" only "cooked the books" on the leaderboards and did not give me any actual advantage in-game.
I'm thinking of Ark:Survival Evolved here, where the grind on 'official' servers is insane - for example taming a Wyvern required you to be online more or less every two hours for three days. On the unofficial servers these were downtuned so you could do things a bit more easily.
But when we briefly ran our own server and realised that we could use god-powers to get the stuff we wanted without the grind... it turned out there wasn't really anything of a game left.
It feels good when you win! If you cheat, that just means you're smarter than the other player.
I also maintained a browser addon for a while that had 100k+ weekly active users that added various features to a browser-based game. Eventually that game had such bad problems with botting and cheating that they had to introduce an anti-cheat system, and we basically got into a little arms race for a year or so where they'd add a new detection system and I'd circumvent it. Similar to the EVE Online modding it was things like workarounds for bugs in the game, improved UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc. Eventually they drew a line in the sand and said anyone using addons of any kind would get a permanent ban, so that was that.
I think the vast majority of cheaters are just in it to ruin other people's fun but sometimes people are violating ToS for a better or different experience with the game. It's unfortunate that the prevalence of malicious cheating means that anti-cheat technology also has to basically ban modding for fun.
Ultimately served as the most effective networking I ever did.
It doesn’t seem very appealing to me, but I don’t think there’s any particularly interesting psychology behind it. Rather one could say I lack creativity and need monsters to motivate me to build anything.
Cheating in real competitive games is rude, though, for sure. But most people don’t play top-level competitive games.
Cheating in pseudo-competitive games like Overwatch or Dota is both rude and stupid. Because the game can just find people to match your cheat-augmented skill level anyway.
It still feels like a game in the sense that there's progression and rewards for progression. For example, learning how to read cooldowns means you can make smarter macros and double your income / cut kill time by half. There's even different "build paths" in that you can choose to go the memory reading build (fragile but reliable), network sniffing build (less fragile but expensive), or computer vision build (easy but unreliable and expensive).
From a technical perspective, the appeal is having an excuse to try out new stuff like SAT solvers, rules engines, or whatever ML thing I just learned about. It's also a good exercise in all the math and data structures + algos stuff I've learned but never use at dayjob. Optionally, building a UI to manage the bot is fun for the same reasons, an excuse to try out new frameworks / design choices / etc. It's basically another programming job but without the icky business / customer considerations.
Though I do agree that cheats in any PvP scenario is pretty lame. It has a much bigger negative impact on other players, and it's not as much of a puzzle (mostly aimbot and pathing). In comparison, PvE games are usually social and unless you're running a swarm of VMs, you're unlikely to affect the economy or otherwise inconvenience anyone.
Nobody on your own team is really gonna notice if you’re cheating unless it’s speed hacks or something. So your own team is hyping you up for being a god, and it feels good.
Plus a lot of people like you - trying it out for the novelty. Most people aren’t doing it, but seeing it once ever 20 games would probably be enough to drive you insane.
I won't say it was better back in the 90s/ early 2000s but games had lobbies and people would just naturally drift around until they found one that satisfied their needs, be it playing more causally or for a more hardcore experience. Nowadays matchmaking is all controlled by the almighty algorithm which is just a glorified ELO/MMR system and dumps people together regardless of whether or not the game is "fun" for them. Worse yet "Quitting" is actively punished so you just have to stay in the game being frustrated and angry at your teammates until you lose. I always use pick up basketball as an example of how lobbies should work with people being given the choice of playing until they are tired/bored and punish trolls by excluding them forcing them to seek out another court or just start their own games.
Now that i have sworn off all competitive multiplayer games because i used to be a real fiend with several thousand hours in Dota 2 i have come to realize that as fun as the game is the fundamental failure of every matchmaking system is that your fun will always be dictated by how often you win because that's the only thing that is rewarded both in the game and by the community. If you look at any forum for these competitive games it's always the same complaints with people bemoaning that the balances is bad (AKA i don't win because if i did why would i complain), the game is too hard for newbies (AKA i don't win because the skill level is too high), and that the community is too toxic (AKA i don't win because i don't take the game too seriously and people get mad at me).
I'm much happier playing singleplayer games or exclusively cooperative games like Helldivers and Deep Rock Galactic and think most people would be too but they need to come to the realization that it's not the games fault per se but the underlying mechanics behind the matchmaking systems.
But if the complainant actually got good then all that did was reverse the roles...
That’s quite the hyperbole, I play plenty of multiplayer games and I enjoy myself plenty wether I win or not. Granted, games like Dota, Counterstrike or Tarkov are designed for a certain ultra-competitive audience, that’s fine, but there’s plenty of choice besides, more than ever.
These competitive games might be at the top of the charts, but they are rather niche in the grand scheme of things. It's just that the kind of people that play these games, they end up only playing that one game for years for a few hours a day. But in reality they are a minority and there are many more players spread out among all other games.
I think you are projecting your motivation to play games onto others, there are many reasons to enjoy games other than just getting those fake points at the end, and not everyone is as sore for loosing.
I need to hop back on that game.
Matchmaking is designed so that you win roughly 50% of the time (except for the very top), no matter how well you play. If you focus on playing better it's going to be a treadmill by design. OTOH some people accept that you're going to lose 50% of matches anyway, chill and keep to lower ELO.
I do agree about the conclusion though. The solution for the disappointment in online matchmaking is singleplayer, and multiplayer with friends. Both completely eliminate the bad actors.
There were TF2 bots that autonomously queued for the game's casual matches, spammed the chat, aimbotted and made the game generally unplayable for a while, you could host a bunch of them on a not so beefy computer and make them queue separately or together.
One of the features of those bots was streaming the chat logs from the matches into Discord/Telegram channels for cheaters/bot hosters to laugh at and make compilations of. It was funny and entertaining to see people having their moods ruined for no reason.
In game (TF2 specifically), when I see cheaters, they are usually also extremely annoying/purposely abrasive in other terms as well - frequent use of racial, transphobic, homophobic slurs, furry/anime/my little pony profile pictures, blatantly cheating while denying it, general smugness - they are trying to maximize the negative reactions they can get out of you. I'm really ashamed to have once been like that and I'm really glad that I grew out of it. It was absolutely not a healthy way to have fun for myself, and not a great community to spend time in (a lot of cheaters pretend to be extremely bigoted for a reaction, but some are genuinely like that). I met some genuinely good, talented people there, but they didn't stay involved with the cheating community for long, and eventually I left it too.
Plus most of the modern multiplayer games, especially fpses, are centered around a few individuals who have skills above the herd or they are playing by different rules (meaning of this is up to you...) and everyone else is just filler so that these above average players can "harvest" them. Just like Bodybuilding. You have the top notch competitors who everyone tries to imitate. And that is what sells the supplements, while all they buy is an illusion that one day they can achieve the same physique.
So let's say you have Apex Legends where well known players show how they literally obliterate everyone else. So the matchmaking (which is deliberately shit) sends these "predators" to hunt the prey, who are essentially sheeps.
People watch these streamers and try to imitate or get to know how to be at the skill level they have (which is near impossible for several reasons, I'd rather not explain). So the whole business centers around these outstanding persons, and the sheep buy the shiny digital bullshit, thinking that might elevate them to the "bigname" monkey's level.
I ran a botting SaaS for Aion years ago, and the constant cat and mouse was what kept me going at it.
I seriously considered cheating at some point just so that I can actually have some fun and get to the end-game without constantly fucking dying. But then I remembered there are other games that I also enjoyed playing, and then I stopped playing CoD.
All in all, it's just power dynamics, and lack of compassion.
The thing is, VAC doesn't immediately ban you. Or anyone else. It's looking for suspicious patterns across hundreds if not thousands of players and collecting evidence over weeks if not months to make sure they got relatively low false-positive rates and don't end up banning people for a Windows update gone wrong... and additionally, it raises the iteration time for cheat developers as well, and that's the true point. Show cheaters immediately that they're spotted and the only thing you enter is an immediate arms race.
Your way of writing a cheat was probably detected but since no one else used it, VAC didn't trigger.
1. Brand new Steam accounts were banned after logging in to Steam client, before even launching any game
2. Replacing "catbot" in user accounts with a random string stopped the bans completely
3. A linux VAC module, dumped similarly to the method described in the article, had access to usernames - I think it was via a getpwent() call. It also collected some other info about the environment (I don't have that binary anymore).
You can probably agree that user account names played at least some role in the bans, even if they weren't the only factor.
* I can't provide concrete evidence for either of those three points as the events took place 8 years ago, feel free to not take my word for it. Maybe you can find someone else from that circle who still has dumped VAC binaries, links to the empty banned accounts or a clone of bot orchestration software repository with a commit that renamed the user accounts and stopped the bans. Maybe even chat logs from that era.
Anyway, at this point it's just a funny piece of tf2 cheating history that has zero impact on anything anymore. So you might as well think it was all fake and I'm just making stuff up, it doesn't matter.
a) more info is readily available b) dedicated server u can run locally even on a potato
no need to test against online folks, there's fine bots available.
or the game engine could track internally what the player is looking at (GTA does this).
It's a bit slow, but you could grab the player ID, then check if the player is on your team or not and then fire. Either by sending a mouse input, or if I remember correctly by writing to a specific address.
However, with enough knowledge (which is mostly documented online) you could actually pull out the hitbox, skeleton and animation data and just run the line-box intersection step yourself. Easier to do internally by hooking in-game functions though.
*Uninterested or just you lost interest. Disinterested means "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage."
I used it to completely automate a grindy task on a server complete with chat hooks, and automatic teleportation to sell the items and back. And also implemented a trainer of sorts with all sorts of functions. The networking didn't appear to handle the teleportation well, and to anyone else my character never moved.
I ultimately didn't use it as an advantage in any meaningful way, I only played to see how far I could mod it and stopped, but never used it against anyone, and stopped playing once I was satisfied with my ill-gotten gains rotting on my account.
Reported it to the devs afterwards, who seemed disinterested but did at least obfuscate the binary, but neglected to do the same to the client JS API loader, so I used that to inject custom client scripts and override server supplied client code.
I'm sure people could do more interesting stuff with BepinEx/Harmony these days, but I never had enough inclination in .NET to learn to implement those. But it was still really fun to twist the game around like that.
I've lost a few steam accounts to accurate but unintended (i.e., not actually cheating) detection of debugging tools attached to totally unrelated processes on the same machine. Having anything open like cheat engine or Tsearch while you join a lobby is a guaranteed ban no matter what. Ethical hacking and malicious hacking are indistinguishable from the perspective of this kind of machine-wide blind signature detection.
Statistical techniques can dramatically reduce false positives in cases like this. If someone at Valve had taken 10 seconds to review my stats during the detected interval, they should have been able to conclude I was not a threat to fair play.
Valve can ban you for any or no reason with no means of recourse or refund.
Totally the same thing, yeah.
It seems super reasonable when it's a one-off thing for your own account. When you think about making it into policy and scaling it up to 1000s of interactions, it quickly becomes unreasonable.
>Statistical techniques can dramatically reduce false positives
For a period of time, anyways. Until the statistics get gamed by the cheaters (e.g. adjust accuracy of your auto-shoot from 100% to 85% or whatever).
The real issue is the cost of false positive detection of cheating is negligible since the vast majority of positives are probably true positives—it’s the cost of doing anti-cheat business (minimal)
But yes cheats would be modified to just below thresholds of detection
I think this might be in reply to my first comment about scaling? If so, I just want to clarify that I was thinking more along the lines of scaling the customer service/ban appeal side rather than infrastructure.
If, for example, every ban had a component of someone at Valve taking 10 seconds to review in-game stats at the time of the ban, and then making a determination of whether or not those stats seem reasonably non-cheater-ish (pretty hard policy question in itself), the process would slow to a crawl.
Sure - looking at K/D, accuracy, etc., is an important factor in a statistical model.
Statistics can also include: Map name, player transform on the map, keyboard and mouse events, GPU utilization, audio playback events, etc. These are all very high information time domain signals that can be correlated with the same from any other player.
After a certain point, I don't think it matters if it is publicly known what your signals are. The amount of information becomes overwhelming in aggregate. You can impose the curse of dimensionality on the cheater.
I don't think these are the type of stats the parent was referring to when they said "If someone at Valve had taken 10 seconds to review my stats".
But sure, those are all examples of statistics to start logging, analyzing, and cross-referencing. (I would argue most of the statistics you listed are of little to no use in identifying false-positives (or good cheaters), but I understand the point you're making with those examples.)
It would maybe reduce the false positive rate by some amount at an increased monetary (and complexity) cost to themselves. I think it would be well past the point of diminishing returns though. Setting up all the infrastructure, policy, processes just to reduce false-positive rates by a few percent, maybe?
I think I'll stand by "that's unreasonable" and "cheaters will game the statistics".
Never used it on Multiplayer games though.
I think a no-brainer solution here, which I am surprised isn't used, is to just immediately kick the account when a well-known signature, such as CheatEngine, is detected. If the program isn't even attempting to get around VAC, there is no point in doing the whole "delayed ban" thing.
That said, my snarky response is "I hope you learned your lesson about the need to restrict proprietary software to a container at all times".
Looking up some quick stats, Steam has 132 million monthly active users and 69 million people use Steam on a daily basis. Not all those games are using VAC, but just looking at CS2, it routinely has over a million players playing it.
Nobody is going to “take 10 second to review” anything with those numbers.
There was a period of time lasting about a month or two where a player with a name like BELT SANDER or ANGLE GRINDER or TABLE SAW hung around. They were pleasant and unremarkable, but they frequently used new Steam accounts and switched IPs.
This person definitely wasn’t supposed to be an admin, but if they were around when someone was cheating and no actual admins were there, they’d somehow elevate their own permissions and ban the offending player. We tried to figure out what was happening and to see if we could somehow stop them, but we never did manage it. They were somehow gaining rcon access to the host server. After a while we just shrugged our shoulders. They didn’t seem to be harming anything, other than our peace of mind about our security. Overall they were actually really helpful for stopping late night/early morning disruptions.
I knew one person who made a wormable payload for a game I won’t disclose which used that method. The methods are in engine.dll so it’s symmetric, clients would infect servers, which in turn infects more clients, etc. Around then was when I decided to start gaming from a VM lol.
How?
Maybe I’m getting my dates mixed up but CS was released in the late 90 / early 90s and consumer virtualisation wasn’t nearly good enough to game in for another 10 years.
Consumer CPUs didn’t have virtualisation extensions and GPU paravirtualisation wasn’t available either in the early 2000s.
VMWare wasn’t even any good for just running Windows 2000 (I mean, it was seriously impressive tech for its time, but it was dog slow even for just basic basic things). So you’d be stuck with Xen for anything serious. And that wasn’t trivial to get set up back then.
Plus given the lack of drivers for virtualised hardware like soundcards and network interfaces, you’d likely be stuck with full fat emulation for those devices.
I guess it's the combination of a frustration of losing matches and the constant suspicion. I was constantly trying to probe things and watching replays, it ruined the game because I was always focusing on cheating.
Ultimately, I think most CS players don't really care about subtle/closet cheaters, so as long as they don't feel it, it's fine, the game keeps its high player count, so it's a good facade and valve is happy with that.
CS is a game I can really enjoy, until I couldn't anymore.
It's been quite a while since I've seen anyone spinbotting though.
Minecraft minigame servers were very competitive, and very shady, using every dark pay-to-win, gacha psychology trick in the book and even some new ones (in particular, pay-to-unban). They also had very public, competitive popularity rankings among themselves, which players actually used to pick a server.
So I'm pretty sure they also actually paid account stealers to go to competing servers and cheat. The account stealers didn't have any better ways to monetize their huge lists of stolen account credentials.
What makes me think this is the huge number of accounts who would cheat in obvious ways and immediately get banned for it. There didn't seem to be much effort to avoid bans, but when you can join minigame after minigame, and all of them have one guy who ruins it by cheating and immediately gets banned, I think that's economics at play, not just psychology.
There is no way to guarantee all participants are legitimate so I am not interested. It feels like a complete waste of time putting in the effort.
This isn't true, or at least it wasn't back in the day. The logic Valve seemed to follow was that VAC was "engine" bans. If you got banned in a GoldSrc game, you'd be banned in all games using that engine, but you'd be allowed to continue playing source games. The same was also true in the opposite case.
More importantly, this meant that getting banned in Modern Warfare 2, wouldn't get you banned in any other game, since no other games were released on that engine.
So while engine specific, people still judged you, especially in pubs (public servers)
Been a _long_ time since I've played. Fucking cheaters.
It's one entry-point among others for RCE. If tomorrow NSA wants to gather any files on your computer, all they need to do is to ask Google to push an update for you through Google Omaha.
https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/privacy/nsa/foia/NSA-Goo...
Google and NSA have a "partnership".
Valve could also have such partnership in theory, through VAC, though unlikely in practice.
They could in theory, but has this actually happened in practice? Pushing a rogue update isn't exactly a novel idea, but despite decades of government document leaks and APTs being analyzed, there's scant evidence that any government pressured a company to push a rogue update. Same goes for other threat models like "government pressuring CAs into issuing a certificate".
So playing that card means moving the entire planet into a lower-trust equilibrium where everyone has to defend against that. In a better-coordinated world the conclusion from that would be "let's not do that", alas on this Earth TLAs have shown that they're willing to burn the commons, forcing a response like RFC 7258.
In all seriousness, DRM/anti-cheats => rootkits/rats. Don't fall for it. Demand better.
To my understanding, the latter is much more effectively solved server-side, but is more costly for the company to run.
I'd rather play a game with server-side anti-cheat than player-side-anti-cheat.
CS:GO actually have heuristics and ML to flag cheaters server-side, but that's only another line of defense - the majority of defense is on the client-side anti-cheat. It's called VACnet, and its bans are temporary - most likely because of false positives.
It's unfortunate, but it is how it is.
Separately though, anti-cheat is another ball of wax entirely, and I have extremely mixed feelings in this field. Generally I favor "cheat detection should be serverside, don't trust the client" from a general security perspective, but... I can totally see a valid case in there, somewhere, for more rigorous clientside checks. Somewhere along that line though is rootkits and malware, and... well, no, please tell me up front that you loaded your game engine with these things so I can save my money and purchase something else, thanks.
[0] Using a custom mapper, which will help initially to discourage low-effort bootlegs at the very least. It's open source though, and will not be too difficult to add to emulators, at which point the dumped ROM should play fine on them.
Yeah...
The simple fact is, it's simply not possible to have completely server-side cheat detection simply because you'll be relying purely on heuristics which could very well be wrong. It's just not going to be possible to tell the difference between a cheater and a really good player.
For any cheat detection to work, it has to be client-side.
Client-side cheat detection can work for tournaments, but it's way simpler there: the tournament provides the hardware, and the players aren't permitted to install anything. This doesn't irritate me quite as much from a security perspective of course, because I am not about to log into my banking site on the presumably insecure tournament device. It's also imperfect: a sufficiently motivated pro player might bypass whatever locks you installed on the thing, especially if they get to spend any time with that device unmonitored.
Even better than that, tournaments have a way better cheat detection method anyway: point a camera at the player's hands. It's suddenly really, really obvious if they're cheating!
At least for competitive AAA titles I don't see why there couldn't be a daily update of the core binary. None of the assets would change so it wouldn't be a large update by any means. In effect it would prevent cheating by imposing impossible work and latency requirements on the tool authors.
The cost of doing this is employing at least one person with deep compiler knowledge who is capable of maintaining the automated system. Obviously that's far too much to ask of indie devs and is probably also out of reach for older titles in most cases.
This is of course all aside from the obvious and common sense but more expensive solution of player flagging, human review, and a binning algorithm (such as trust factor). Avoids needing to ban anyone in the first place and has the added benefit of being at least mildly effective against computer vision based botting solutions (for which there is fundamentally no solution).
Or just private servers and let the individual admins sort it out but god forbid players be permitted to run their own communities corporate might lose out on profit if that were a thing (can't risk another DotA after all).
It is no coincidence that America and Japan, the two countries with the most draconian copyright protections, continue to be the dominant player in the game industry.
Profit motive and the ability to reinvest previous profits into future products is the greatest force multiplier in our planet’s history bar none. You can either suck it up like China did in the 90s and convert to a capitalist economy, or stay in the breadline forever. Oh, in this case, I mean play tux racer forever :P
Unfortunately, doesn't look like the followup post (about analyzing the VAC DLLs) has been written.
It's been a cat and mouse game since the dawn of gaming and e-sports.
Fun fact: CS 1.6 competetive had what was called "Organner" when teams switched over from CAL to CEVO (first paid e-sports online league) and as well as ESEA which is acclaimed for its anti-cheats; the pro players you see/saw such as n0thing, summit-1g (not saying he did cheat, he wasn't pro in CS1.6, 1g was a pug team that meant 1st generation and a lot of us were in it) -- but everybody in the pro scene around that did cheat, or had cheaters on their team.
n0thing was banned from CAL rigorously for cheating in CAL-Premier and rejoined with complexity after ringing for other teams in CS1.6 matches (ban evading). he's admitted to cheating in CS 1.6, and found fame with Counter-Strike 1.6'd Evil Geniuses organization which encompanied the old compLexity roster.
These dickheads went on to make fortunes; not to say that they weren't good in their own respects, but people such as n0thing openly admit, and will admit if you ask them on the stream if they cheated in 1.6 to get to where they're at.
You could inject cheat codes through your mouse drivers at LANs and if you set a low FOV aimbot, it was undetectable: IE triggers when you aim at their chest, aims up to hit the head; and had advanced net code modifiers to land bullets in places you weren't aiming all together.
Knowing this, completely ruined the pro scene and wanting to watch these matches and personalities all together. To know how many legitimate players out there were passionate about these games, looking to go pro, and really enjoy competing at the highest levels couldn't because the skill gap was so significant, and then even more so because pro players had undetectable cheats.
Still to this day it is virtually impossible to detect hacks, however games such as DotA2 make it signifcantly harder to cheat by only sending frames/updates when it should; rather than old games sending all player data. I believe Valorant has a decent system but all in all; I helped run the leagues and the level and problem at which cheating was occurring, was known about, and not being able to prove what you know, would make you SICK if you ever enjoyed competing in e-sports.
You can inject cheats directly in to the Xbox's back then directly through the fight sticks
You'd know though if somebody was cheating so not sure how crazy the SF scene had cheats but check out tool assisted; when I originally saw it I just put my head down
I personally prefer watching a game that doesn't have downtime. Watching teams buy items and walk around is not interesting. So, so much downtime in all these big team games.
Fun times were had as a script kiddie spawning the president and placing it in an IFV and just go demolishing the other players base with this fancy laser. But hey, I was 15 at the time.
Habbo Hotel too, being part of a "mafia" with a habbo multi hacker app; the flicker glitch that made your character blink causing lag. That and placing furni in rooms in the walls using ArtMoney filters. I discovered perl while messing with MSN bots; I miss those ages.
Others include NeoPets and Flash game hacking including RCEing the Money Tree claiming the loot before anyone else. Then I discovered IRC and Rx/PHAT botnets infecting via Windows 98 DCOM/NetSend exploits.
Tried it at school and next thing two of the colleges rejected my application, parents called and banished from using any computer in secondary school for the next two years. The college I went to was low-level polytechnic but the couple of the lecturers I had noticed my skill and homed me on a different path than being a BlackHat.
My moral compass kicked in and even now it's an itch I really want to scratch nowadays but PenTesting/CyberSecurity are too "prestigious" that the only chance is to fall in to.
So I've been an Sys/Unix Admin for past 18 years watching the world burn. I was using Linux (Debian/Slackware) when the kernel was at version 2 and Xorg was XFree86.
Luckily FreeBSD 8 gave me some fresh air after some IRC user rooted my box hosting my IRCd (on 56k) and did the honours of replacing Debian Linux with Debian kBSD. They left me a PM on IRC telling me to stay out of trouble and I've been using FBSD ever since. I'm 36. Never saw them again.
"Hey kid, stay out of trouble. btw your irc is down".
I will always remember that message waking up to a login MoTD with new root/password of some strange OS I had never used. I was angry that I lost my five botnet (T2 army) but I am grateful nowadays for it saving grace.
Not until many years later, I couldn't work out how they did until I came across of a backup of my early PHP3 script that allowed you to issue commands to the host. Apache was running as root and this was hosted in a public web directory (doy).
Oh. That's what happened to me. I always wondered where those lasers came from. I thought it was just a weird custom map.