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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

Kind of crappy sensationalist article. This is common behavior for game clients which do this sort of thing to detect cheating and bots. E.g. World of Warcraft trying to detect automated gold farming, etc.. I can think of at least four programs that do this sort of thing and it would only be news if it didn't, honestly.

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While I am aware that warden and things like it can scan the memory of processes, I don't think they are granted full access to read everything on your system. I believe their are restrictions like the file must actively be reading / writing your processes memory before you can scan it.

There is definitely 0 reason that they should be scanning all of the files on your computer and storing them in some sketchy gibberish registry settings. Who knows what else they are looking at.

This is no different then Sony putting rootkits on their audio CD's in order to "prevent piracy". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...

Warden in fact has capabilities to scan absolutely anything on your computer, but it only does it when new cheat definitions are shipped. (This only happens during mass banwaves which happen every couple of years)

I'm not an OS wizard, but checking the continuity of your working memory sounds pretty expensive and wouldn't necessarily give you the source. I have no idea how you'd look for outside reads unless you had full permissions.

Can you expand a little bit if you have some knowledge on the subject?

Hahaeha, no, warden can and does scan EVERY SINGLE THING on your system. Good luck with fixing that whole "trusting companies that release games I like" thing.

I actually don't even play any blizzard games, but I thought I remembered them being sued over warden overstepping its bounds back in the day. I tried to search for it though and cannot find any evidence, so I guess I must have been wrong.

Edit: I did find mention of it on the Wikipedia article about Warden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warden_(software)

On 23 June 2010 Blizzard updated the Warden Anti-Cheat Platform to version 2 - named Warden 2.0 - with World of Warcraft Patch 3.3.5.

Warden now scans Warcraft II and III game memory space only, with exception of a few tools.

Obviously it's a Wikipedia article, and no source listed for that claim, so who knows if it's accurate.

I'm fairly certain you can gracefully sandbox Origin without losing functionality or impacting your game. Is Warden the same in that respect?

No, you'll be banned, because anticheats are malicious and will ban you if you're an outlier not allowing full access to your system.

Any idea which sandbox utility to use?

I have developed a game. Can you give me shell access to your box?

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