Hacking into Kernel Anti-Cheats: How cheaters bypass Faceit, ESEA and Vanguard anti-cheats

[@unityresearch]

EDIT: WE ARE SO BACK! Sorry about the time this video was down, now that I have it back up and my channel status is re-instated, I will be making more videos! Thanks to everyone who's supported this channel! ------------------------ Hi All! Rem here, Forgot to mention I didn't play competitive at all. I also down tuned the aimbot down to be around the same level as the other players I encountered during Swift or unrated play to try and not be disruptive to those games as well. Only the first clips are of gameplay I recorded, the other cheating footage is from gameplay I've found posted by other cheaters. Since I am getting a few comments about it, I used AI voice because I was in a bad accident that renders it difficult for me to speak, so TTS allows me to vocalize. Technology is amazing :3 I know this video is long delayed, I've been working on it for a long time now. This video serves as a precursor to future videos, so at times explanations in this video will be oversimplified in order to better understand the concept. There are chapters in this video if you need a refresher on a particular subject, or if you are only interested in learning about a particular cheating methods. I wanted to explore how cheaters get around root level anti cheats, especially since there is a call for Valve to implement one for CS2, so that they don't have to rely on 3rd party anti-cheats like faceit. I chose to look at this from the perspective of Valorant's anti-cheat Vanguard, as it has the largest player base using a kernel anti-cheat, and is most often cited as an example of an anti-cheat that Valve should implement for Counter Strike. This video is not meant to glorify cheating or encourage cheating, but rather to explore it as a technical topic. I hope you all enjoy.

[@nasimbhai3032]

😮😢

[@ecifi]

Thank you for helping me understand why

[@gameslayre8950]

im in many of these VALORANT discord servers, trust me.. its way worse than u guys think it is. One server has over 25K members! They even giveaway and sell VALORANT accounts for skins and ranks that arent teir own, they're hacked accounts. I have about 6-7 accounts worth over 50K VP for free

[@unityresearch]

@@gameslayre8950 yup, its really bad, and so many people don't even know its such a problem

[@shawn8425]

​@@gameslayre8950Which discord servers are these? I need to check this out for myself. I have spent a lot of money supporting this game and I can't believe it My experience has been really bad lately.

[@aarkyyd]

next Vanguard update = Riot sending an employee to your home while you are playing ranked to watch you.

[@strong1134]

😂😂😂

[@strong1134]

they will proctor online

[@sleepenstein5406]

Riot is going to just give her a job.

[@ANDR0iD]

I rather have VAC cause of this. Vanguard is the worst, it runs 24/7 even when you are not playing the game and it still is just as useless as any other anticheat...

[@aarkyyd]

@@ANDR0iD "still is just as useless as any other anticheat..." haven't you watched the video, it takes sophisticated methods to bypass VG so the number of cheaters are significantly less. I am level 390 in Valorant, which means I've been playing at least 2 or 3 days a week for the last 4 years. I don't think there were more than 5 or 10 instances of cheating. Even I don't like Vanguard and its invasion in our PCs but it is very effective to say the least.

[@Kyle-qn9ci]

The mods on the Valorant subreddit completely nuked the comment chain discussing this video 😒

[@unityresearch]

Yup, they nuke any discussion about cheating at all. I've tried posting various stuff over the years exposing the cheating issues but the mods just purge any and all discussion. Riot doesn't want people to think there's a problem when there clearly is.

[@-GRXNDSCOPER-]

YES CRINGE RIOT JUST AS THEY DONT WANT TO ADMIT THEY HAVE PROBLEMS WITH BALANCE IN MM ON SOME ACCOUNTS WHEN PPL GET ALL TIME TROLLS LOWER KD PLAYERS VS BETTER PLAYERS@@unityresearch

[@justjack3075]

@@unityresearch thats normal all these companies are a rip-off...but at least the chinese are actually trying unlike western companies who just let cheats explode and only care about stealing your money

[@saturnna467]

@@unityresearchI’m a valorant fan don’t let the idiots dissuade you, this kind of stuff is important and real fans of the game thank you.

[@josuoh9888]

@@unityresearch I think the main reason it's nuked is that the conversation of _where_ the cheats are obtained and how effective they are shouldn't be on the main valorant subreddit, and reasonably so. It shouldn't be the place where this information gets sent around, and so they're being extra careful to not expose any holes. I think the proper location for these topics would be a private cheat forum or in an official interview/discussion where information could be either classified or declassified for the public.

[@gibbeldon]

As someone with background in computer science I really love the level of detail in this video.

[@micholous]

I have only little bit experience, yet most of these i at least knew of. Kinda sad how easy it is tbh Nonetheless, the video was very entertaining indeed

[@TheMamba212]

As someone

[@jonahgreen6668]

WOW man thats crazy u have a back ground in that! U must be really intelligent then! Well anyways, find a sturdy limb that will hold u up.

[@LxveSkidy]

@@TheMamba212 As

[@midahe5548]

as someone who is currentlycreating a cheat on Bioshock (not the remaster). I really appreciate the level of detail (And yes. i don't deal with AC cause there isn't any on Bioshock)

[@nadirqg]

It's really nice to see someone deep dive into the technical side of the cheating problem. Most people talk about the drama around it but very few have the skills to explain the technical details behind it. Well done.

[@christophergash8460]

I do not EVER post comments on videos, but as a cybersecurity professional, game dev, and adamant game junky. This is one of the best videos I have ever watched, I loved every second of this. You have 100% earned my respect and my subscription.

[@kalidesu]

You know the voice is Ai don't you?!

[@jancarldampil4803]

Doesn't mean the content isn't good though?

[@Rotem_S]

@@kalidesuWait is the creator not a REAL robot girl?? Oh my god, I feel so betrayed rn

[@vir2084]

@@Rotem_S 😭😭😭

[@yukionna8554]

completely agreed, as a red teamer myself I've often struggled to explain lower-level concepts to my juniors and IR teams, and this video did such an incredible job of explaining many of these concepts in a super-digestible format. I'm actually going to make this mandatory learning for juniors to explain kernel level exploits in a way that they can find tangibly useful without having to actually learn low level hacking themselves.

[@Harukoon92]

Having majored in Computer Science I understand your coverage infinitely more than I would've years ago. I love the level of detail showcased in this video. You're kill'n it. Keep at it.

[@il_panda1979]

Have no idea how what the fk computer science is, I feel like you

[@overbored1337]

As a cat owner i can confirm

[@captainidowork8506]

as computer science itself, i can confirm

[@bryan0x05]

It's essentially a software engineering degree with a bit more focus on the math and theory. Many universities usually have a computer science degree program instead of a dedicated software engineering degree. Harukoon is talking about how this video covers topics that have whole sub-fields dedicated to them. For example, hardware-level cheats, are breaching into computer engineering a different degree than computer science. Kernel-level cheating is breaching into kernel-level coding which is a highly-specialized field(That actually has a shortage of engineers for it cause it's that specialized). @@il_panda1979​

[@rawallon]

@@overbored1337 As a Cat I can confirm

[@Maypopx]

This is the most accurate video I've seen in my life on the topic of cheating. I just hate how valorant players think that vanguard is good compared to other anticheats like faceit. I really hope this video blows up and more people see it!

[@depralexcrimson]

technical people will say that in terms of actual effectiveness, faceit is pretty close to vanguard, but vanguard is more secure. faceit one is just waaaaaay more intrusive, that's why it technically bans more people compared to vanguard, but keep in mind Riot cares about effectiveness, faceit literally bans you for having drivers that don't even touch cs2/csgo at all, doesn't like certain software and software drivers being loaded and will most likely ban you even if you don't cheat, in a lot of circumstances depending on how technical you are and what you keep on your pc. vanguard only bans you if you mess with their game, they don't care what you do in other games. + it has way more advanced memory protection features, than eac/be/faceit combined.

[@n3on440]

​@depralexcrimson faceit isn't practical nor good anymore. If you are really inside the cheating scene you know the hope for faceit is long dead... it just is as sad as it is. when you go 2.5k+ people sit with same kernel cheats pasted for years (some people pay for this free dogsh1t even hundreds of dollars). you just ask yourself how is this possible - and here is a secret: all the acs rely on admins to review demos. Nowadays ac just tries to prevent you from toggling in same lame ways, vanguard and faceit ac sit with admin teams reviewing demos and banning only more blatant cases. There is no help to this genre of games, only cheating experts can literally detect that

[@faranocks]

@@depralexcrimson faceit and vanguard have the same level of intrusiveness, faceit AC may be more sensitive, and ban more things, but they have the same level of system access, and are therefore equally intrusive.

[@dinamik7]

​@@faranockshhshhah you are funny!!! 80% on face it cheat...to this day i write you this!!! And this is a fact...not even questionable fact!! 80% trust me! So easy to cheat on this shit platform!!

[@GrammeStudio]

@@depralexcrimson i wonder if vanguard will pose a problem to folks who use name revealer (without lobby crash function) in league ranked, as in will they be AUTOMATICALLY BANNED? official riot stance is that they're against hacks but they have unofficially stated that they do see an issue with name revealer (w/o crash function), which can hardly be called a hack. it's literally merely reveal player names that developers hide after all users of this program do not have any real edge over others, and merely use it to dodge being in the same match with players they dont like

[@datoaster4991]

As a Linux user who can't run a lot of games due to kernel anti-cheats and constatly hearing ppl defending it and basically saying "JuSt UsE WiNdOwS, bRo" I feel very validated in my struggle to make games more accessible for non-Windows users

[@pieguy_99]

Kernel anti cheat benefits nobody except the company collecting all your data lol

[@Imran7jr]

@@pieguy_99 Chinese Tencent is the parent company of Rito. Rito is adding vanguard to league of legends as well.

[@marteronde]

Something something cave something something allegory something something old greek philosopher Life ain't easy in a box

[@operator8014]

You're not missing out on ANY decent games. But yeah, you should just be running Windows. Tiny10 and Tiny11 are no-brainers.

[@BigLongRandomNumberNameM-kf9vy]

I'm a C developer. Linux makes sense to me. Kernel-level anti-cheat _never ever_ made sense to me. Windows still supports kernel-level drivers (obviously, that's what kernel-level anti-cheat runs as)... Which means that you can write software that runs in kernel-mode yourself. When you're the kernel, you can do anything you like with any software you like. So... What's stopping a cheat doing the same? I swear people just don't think things through.

[@matom208]

I don't understand why yt recommended me this video since I haven't even played a single Valorant match in my entire life, but I really liked it. Very informative and easy to follow.

[@electricz3045]

I mean you probably play other games, games which also use a kernel level anticheat so all those measures to get around it which were shown here, would also work on the other kernal level anticheat.

[@matom208]

@@electricz3045 not really, I actively avoid games with kernel anticheats

[@Lobos222]

You have watched other videos on hacking in video games. That is why...

[@matom208]

@@Lobos222 not at all

[@jer1776]

I never have either but I follow a lot of Cybersecurity stuff and I'm a gamer.

[@Denis-nh5bv]

It's uncanny how good the ai narrator is. Good job on the production, you blew my hat off

[@GQCodes]

yes, finally a good ai narrated video which isn't shit.

[@valmetj]

I was thinking the same thing. Do you know where I can find this AI narrator?

[@BioTheHuman]

Wtf? I was about to compliment the creator for her voice 💀 Me thinking I was immune to AI stuff 🤡

[@Kiprikk]

@@valmetj yeah what the ai name

[@blaaze_e]

elevenlabs@@Kiprikk

[@skramzrave]

The week after valorant launched i scripted a basic AHK triggerbot which detected the glow color of enemy players and sent a mouseclick input. It's funny how valorant digs so deep into protecting the game memory that simple visual cheats are some of the most effective.

[@DavidRamirez-lq2co]

The easiest way to combat cheaters is to make an alf assed anticheat and don't ban cheaters, make them figth each other (in my opinion).

[@baraka629]

​@@DavidRamirez-lq2co You mean like VAClive and trust factor nuking?

[@bojcio]

@@DavidRamirez-lq2co thats a terrible idea

[@DavidRamirez-lq2co]

@bojcio tell me why so. If you ban them they will come back If you make them face cheaters they will quit

[@marhanen]

@@DavidRamirez-lq2co that's what ricochet tried to do, it isn't working, they find out they are shadow banned and just make another account`

[@FriendlyKillbot]

DMA bit blows my mind. Back in the days Starcraft Brood War had just came out, a friend of mine's older brother had some kind of debugging PC hooked up via some card and ribbon to another PC. Both PC's had an instance of SC Brood War, one he played on, and one that was just showing a full map but you could still interact with it, scroll around, etc; a full maphack He was so proud of himself, and I guess he was ahead of his time.

[@bazooka712]

Well DMA is just a method of communication, like BUS. Ethernet and peripherals might use DMA

[@BillLambert]

DMA has been a core feature of any PC since the 8086, it's kind of like an admin assistant for the CPU. It's a way for motherboard devices and add-in cards to access memory without bothering the CPU so it can keep doing more important work. For example a network card will request a few megabytes as a buffer, then the OS will write network packets into that buffer, and once it's full (or there are no more packets to send), it tells the card to send it all, and DMA takes over to handle the actual movement so the main CPU can immediately go work on something else. A DMA cheating device probably works quite similarly, but instead of staying in its little corner, it receives commands from the second PC to move all over the memory space and reporting back everything it sees, until the cheat software finds what it wants and can focus on that specific area.

[@dragoonsunite]

Yeah this whole video and any effort by developers at this point to stem cheating REALLY only covers mass distribution of cheats. Anyone who privately wants to cheat, and is tech savvy enough can easily do so without pretty much any risk of being caught. Figuring out how to make your own drivers and a custom DMA board and then program your own Arduino (I like the Duo since I don't have to solder on a seperate shield to do passthrough), and use low latency screen cap direct from the HDMI, with a custom spliced HDMI cable, is undetectable. You can go out and find the software to make your own aimbots if you don't want to use system memory as well using image recognition. YOLOv8 is available for people to just use, since its open sourced for all sorts of applications, including robotics, self driving cars, security cameras, category and object labeling, but you can also just use it to make an aimbot. Even if all such image processing software was locked behind needing to provide justifications to use it, even an amateur programmer could just look up image processing research papers and make their own from scratch in combination with $200.00 of indian labor to take pictures with a trigger screen capture device in a given game, and another $200.00 of labor to have the same or another guy manually box and label all those images for training data, and then training your own network from scratch after using GPT and basic coding knowledge to build it from scratch and train it on your own hardware over the period of a week or so. You can go get external hardware as low end as a Raspberry Pi, or you can brute force it with something more high end like an Nvidia Jetson and then correct the control through a custom driver as I mentioned piping your mouse through a duo. Obviously a lot of steps are missing here, but with something like an Nvidia Jetson you can also layer on extra nuances, such as capturing a bunch of natural play (Again cheap Indian labor is great for this, a couple hours of 50 different guys playing while using a high end mouse and keyboard logger with screen capture), and use that data to create a layer that modifies the tracking and correction of the first part of the code by adding skew and other minor nuance to simulate human like movement and prevent more advanced profiling anticheats like Waldo Vision from being able to tell its not human or a specific person. If you're smart, you add in psychological elements that will draw your attention to the peripheries of the screen in regular increments to simulate how higher skilled players keep their head on a swivel, but, doing so in various tempos, as well as subtlety changing the tempos of your other key presses unnoticeably to create layers of identity masking within a threshold defined by your training data. Finally, combine all of that with custom hardware spoofing, burner phone numbers and emails, alt accounts, and custom VPN routing off purchased severs (Better than using VPN services since non-VPN server use that you make into a VPN is less likely to be flagged, and you can literally find servers almost anywhere), and you can have a from scratch totally custom undetectable cheat system. To boot... You can really get stupid and use DMA as well if you want to get into high level stuff and have your own "network controller" made that just happens to grab extra data that isn't otherwise registered through any official channels. You can indeed make your own PCBs in a garage if you're a creator and purchase and ball and install your own microcontrollers and custom build them. You need to be willing to make your own drivers and firmware so now we're talking about 6 months of self education and a lot of work, but its not actually all that difficult or expensive frankly, and you can do it in such a way that by the time your done, in combo with the above you have true 100% undetectable wall hack that is indistinguishable to your computer and any level of kernel anticheat from just playing naturally. The issue here is once you wall hack you can get manually banned for tracking and looking at things you shouldn't conspicuously, so smart cheaters will PROBABLY just not do this OR if they do, they'll stick to a DMA map and not a DMA wall hack in combination with a computer vision map (OR if you want to go next level, make it so that you have the map, and make the boxes only form when you have LOS, but I think some people might still notice conspicuously stopping at corners only when an enemies about to round them because you are using the map for example). Point being, there's no end to this arms race, and right now anticheat is really only even touching mass cheat distribution with absolutely barely anything going towards dedicated individuals who want to make their own solutions.

[@Slough_Monster]

@@dragoonsunite I am willing to bet that a vast majority of cheaters buy their cheats and don't make their own. If you were able to get rid of them, then you would have solved most of the problem and could ignore the insignificant portion of people making their own cheats.

[@hedgehog3180]

@@Slough_Monster I'm not sure if it's really the vast majority, I think at least a good portion are solely cheating because Riot turned cheating into a fun puzzle and not because they care about getting an advantage. I mean this has all the fun of hacking without any of the risks.

[@boycycle]

Thanks to the KZbin recommendations I found this one. I really enjoyed watching this video. A rare find, production wise, compared to other clickbaity videos on this topic. I find it quite hilarious how far the human creativity goes just to earn an advantage in an online game. I also thought that Vanguard was the unbeatable endboss for all cheat developers, guess I was wrong. Left a sub and looking forward to more content like this! :D

[@didierno-cil]

This video is actually interesting and tells knowledge unlike 99% of vids on the matter, good work

[@Pandize]

Glad I know how to do it myself now~ Seriously though, I think videos like this are a big problem and cause a massive wave of new cheaters. Education at the cost of worsening the problem. :(

[@Richard-kj2no]

@@Pandizei think so too

[@ducky1681]

@@Pandize I really don't think that's true. They might cause a wave of new cheaters, but keeping people in the dark is not the way here. I would rather have a 1000 educated people and 300 cheaters than have nobody having a clue and there being 150 cheaters out of 1000. Obviously the numbers I gave are way out of proportion but you get my point, educating people is never a bad thing, no matter the topic.

[@HerbaceousM8]

@@Pandize how could it get worse, i cant even play 3 games of prem in my rank without getting at least 1 cheater

[@eagleclaws1781]

@@Pandize as a matter of fact, education people on how to cheat properly will reduce the major concern on why people cheat nowadays, and that is to make money. Thousands of Cheat sellers earn a stupid amount of money by distributing cheats to people, and alot of people who buy those cheats either use them for RMT or Boosting (RMT as in selling ingame items for real money or simply trading accounts). The major reason why boosting for example is so popular is because alot of people dont have the know-how of how diffdrent cheats and anti-cheat programs actually work. On another hand, the less people know about cheats the harder it is for people to tell if somebody is actually cheating, with indepth knowledge this could lead to people having more of a clue if somebody is playing suspiciously like having a Macro, recoil-script or Triggerbot, or having actual nerds trying to use said knowledge to educate themselves on creating private software that helps tackling cheaters in particular. TL:DR=Cheating has always been very popular in the History of Humanity, its just thanks to the Internet and beeing able to play games with people accross the planet that Humanity as a whole has the chance to be made more aware of it, so educating people on the matter is considerably more important that to stay quiet about what always has been a real problem

[@underscorenul]

As someone who dabbles in hobby OS dev, compilers, interpreters, etc, you did a great job simplifying the complex concepts of how these anticheats work. And it was a great introduction to the topic of how cheats still work despite these rootkit-style anticheats. Thanks for the fascinating video, and I’m glad KZbin recommended it! You’ve got a sub from me!

[@ImpreccablePony]

I hope someone someday develops an AI-powered anticheat so we can bypass manual checks, the ultimate cheater sniff test. Wouldn't that be a blessed day for us all?

[@underscorenul]

@@ImpreccablePony Can I recommend this? kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y364dot9lt15eqM AI is just the next fad as cryptocurrency and is just as devoid of practicality.

[@SnowTheKitsune]

Vabnguard banned Valorant player for cheats he used in another game. I think if someone would develop that level anti cheat cheater might start think before using them and ruining fun.@@ImpreccablePony

[@gardian06_85]

@@ImpreccablePony who watches the watchers? this is naïve at the best, and dystopian at the worst. this is an arms race, and as shown the most effective are simple, and the only way to stop would be to lock down to specific hardware with checksums (which can still be spoofed) as long as there are rules there will be a good number of people wanting to get really close to those rules without directly breaking them.

[@ImpreccablePony]

@@gardian06_85 Who watches the watchers indeed. Well in AI art case one AI creates and image and the other AI checks if he can spot abnormalities with the image. If he does he sends the image back to the first AI to re-create. The process continues until the second AI cannot spot any abnormalities with the image. You see where I'm going with it right?

[@nexhi991]

This video explains so well what I've been feeling recently. In CSGO I was playing on above 4k elo for some years now and I've met plenty of Pros in my lobbies and even was a invited to FPL-C. While playing premium matchmaking on Faceit with my mates I've faced players that have no HLTV, no records on ever playing in any tournament, qualifiers or whatever and they were absolute monsters in every aspect of the game. Just something felt off while playing against them all the time. They were so confident, so aware but also implimented failing in their gameplay sometimes. Now just imagine how hard it is to spot these cheaters. When you are a good player that managed to go beyond 4k elo, your cheat only needs to be active during maybe pistol rounds or other clutch rounds to win a game. When I saw all these videos and reddit threads and also some discord leaks of semi pros actually using DMA, I gave up on trying to go competitive. I withdrew from fplc and only played for fun. As long as this plague of hackers is not diminished alot, it makes no sense to play.

[@alexandredantas3545]

Well AI is going to kill online competitive gaming anyway. The moment a general AI goes open source, online competitive is pretty much dead and with it E-Sport. Unless augmented players become a thing like F1 you have the "pilot" for raw talent and then engineers for the pure technical aspect. It's like deepmind level of play but on potato PC so available to anyone...

[@careem3463]

@@alexandredantas3545weird take. What machine learning would provide useful for cheating that isn't available yet?

[@PanSalut]

​@@alexandredantas3545AI may just save FPS games from cheaters. Perhaps, with enough data, artificial intelligence will be able to analyze server-side footage of cheaters and ban them based on matching their suspicious behavior

[@mirzu42]

@@alexandredantas3545kind of funny how you see AI being used to cheat but fail to realize its also going to be used to detect cheaters. Im pretty sure AI could even end triggerbots and wallhacks.

[@TheSuperappelflap]

i mean valve and tournament orgs have collectively ignored cheating at lans since 2015 so this is what you get. culture goes top down, the people at the top cheat and dont get punished so now everyone and their grandma is cheating. especially on faceit where you can earn points and other stuff for winning. i played faceit years ago, didnt even get that high and there were cheaters in my games half of the time, same as on matchmaking. so i stopped paying for it. This isnt unique to cs btw, I have played lots of shooters and in all of them some losers cheat in tier 6 online cups without prize pools just because they can. but whats special about cs is that people cheat at pro level, everyone knows it and no one does anything about it.

[@ratykat]

Damn, this has opened my eyes to a whole new world of excuses for why I'm doing so badly in a game. Excellent video!

[@baraka629]

My #1 excuse is my coke was cut

[@gama2064]

holy shit Ai voices are getting really good

[@ivanquiroga6283]

knew this wasn't a woman

[@luckytanuki5449]

Honestly worked really well for the video too. Very monotone but factual that it helped get across the very specific and technical information. Not to mention it's just all around soothing which compliments the "boring" (for lack of a better world) topic.

[@sujimayne]

​@@ivanquiroga6283Might be, might not be. Doesn't matter. They said that they are not using their real voice due to having been in an accident and not being able to verbally communicate.

[@BustyCatbot]

@@ivanquiroga6283 I mean, you don't know that for sure.

[@Artfacility]

I know this voice, its one of the default audiobook narrator ones from elevenlabs

[@eymongaming7217]

Mans casually dropped the hardest video on cheating ever and thought we wouldn't notice

[@ngzz2498]

its a woman i think, but it sounds like AI voice tho

[@AvantuPL]

​@@ngzz2498 +1, I refuse to belive that unknown Woman created so deep material and have such good enunciation and speech. I'm not saying that Women couldn't make such video, but it's unlikely, at least i don't believe that random unknown youtuber would do such good speach. It has to be AI or some freelancer voiceover actor.

[@AvantuPL]

@@ngzz2498 I can see in the video that the creator uses polish language in CS GO for example so maybe it's someone from Poland.

[@mycelia_ow]

@@ngzz2498 It's not, the voice is from Elevanlabs, it's a text-to-speech AI. I know this exact voice the uploader is using too, because I use Elevenlabs all the time.

[@Atitkos]

@@ngzz2498 it's 100% an AI voice but the writing of the video is so good I don't mind. Edit: It's a nice AI voice, so I didn't mean it in a bad way!

[@ox4tune]

I can't actually believe how fucking good this documentary/vid is... Didn't even realize it's 40mins, felt like a couple mins lmfao. Insane level of editing (nah for real, amidst the best), focuses on the subject while leaving many hints to dive deeper into certain subjects, stays neutral about everything and just hella informative. I wasn't even remotely interested in the cheating industry before. Heck now maybe in the future I'd consider being anti-cheat dev... at leaast I'll surely try and make some it geniunely looks way more interesting that I initially assumed. Thank you so much

[@logoanimation4489]

i am a cs student and i never thought cheaters use something as simple and cheap as arduino to baypass intrusive million dollars anti cheats, brilliant idea lmao, and top content btw , keep it up, maybe content about the ai cheats/anti cheats as ai based tools are the trend nowedays.

[@unityresearch]

that's the plan!

[@dkkogmaw1311]

gl with arduino transfer speeds 😂 it’s not as cheap and simple as you think

[@1bite-]

@@dkkogmaw1311 maybe not an uno which only has a serial port but anything a bit more expensive like a leonardo that actually has HID capability should give you fast enough transfer speeds to do exactly what you need

[@anonapache]

@@dkkogmaw1311 There are so many sbc's out there, you really think this will be a problem at all?

[@丷]

@@dkkogmaw1311 it literally is that cheap and simple lol

[@BlueprintHD]

This is actually a really good, informative, well produced video. Appreciate your time and effort. After playing cs for over 20 years, reaching relatively high lvls, i have quit cs2 recently and went to valorant. As i am ranking up (diamond right now) I sometimes came across people who would have the craziest reflexes, and I couldn't say they were smurfing as I have experienced high lvl cs gameplay and even there this would be abnormal. But I believed the anticheat to be very strong, so I figured I might just have become older and slower. I guess that might not be the reason

[@Maximus0451]

Man, where were you when I was doing my computer architecture and digital systems design course? You could’ve taught me everything I needed to know in just a few hours. Good work on the video. It completely changed the way I think about anti-cheats.

[@LeonAlkoholik67]

I don't know about you, but the AHK code of the video creator is very bad, so I'm not sure how much you could learn in that particular topic 😅 Guy doesn't understand auto-execute section, spams settings over and over again, that are not used within the script itself, random uses a predictable open source algorithm, uses v1.1 which is already end of life, and uses slow & bad PixelSearch (slow CPU only) instead of a fast library like ShinsImageScanClass. The AHK docs themselves are also better than almost any other language, but the guy didn't bother reading it well enough 🤷‍♀️

[@AuspiceGwan]

This single video explaining cheating on PC in FPS games is enough to earn you a credit for high quality content creator. It concludes all cheating methods seen nowadays, offers simple but very clear explanation for each method's way of working and offers a great value of info. The only point is that the sprite used in some cutscenes does not follow what is spoken with the mouth action, but still, this video is one of the few top quality ones I have seen recently on YT. Great job bro, great job!

[@emberframe6994]

It is really easy and that's the scary thing. Kernal level doesn't work and it's just spyware.

[@aitorbleda8267]

There is one cheat missing: the network hack. Using a MITM attack to yourself, you intercept packets and learn the positions of the enemies, etc, leading to a slightly delayed version of the DMA hack.

[@Demopans5990]

@aitorbleda8267 And prob a bit harder to detect. Vanguard isn't likely to go as far as requiring custom router firmware

[@shippy1001]

Those apply for Consoles as well, although they are "harder" to pull off, it`s essentially the same.

[@tomikun8057]

​@@emberframe6994It does work. Did you not watch the video? It makes the bar for extreme hacking higher. It reduces the hacks available on a low bar. It's something...

[@kingpurest6279]

Only 1.8k subs for this high quality piece is nuts. I'll be tuning in from now on

[@vike256]

It's rare to see such a high-quality and interesting video in this field of topic.

[@MTweedC4]

I didnt expect this video to be so well made! Well done, was a pleasure to watch

[@Caeiro619]

I must say i really hate cheaters, but the technical aspect of it its just beautifull, and you showed it and explained it perfectly. My hopes of having clean legit games in CS2 just got Absolutly shated on, but damn this video is enlightning on the technical aspect of cheating. Thanks for this video.

[@anotherrabbithole]

Please don't be discouraged to join the losers stay strong and play fair.

[@Caeiro619]

@@anotherrabbithole nahh i won't join the dark side, i love the game, and i love to learn it, and feel the gratification of winning a well disputed game cleanly. I just shared my toughts on the technical aspect of cheating, but i condone its use. I really think valve should make a separate mode for cheaters. If they wanna cheat, let them cheat, but let them cheat all together against eachother and let the legit players play agains other legit players. Valve will never getter a grip on this problem, and they don't even want to.

[@Rpgreat]

@@anotherrabbithole LOL every top 20% player has cheated in every single game for many years. Now in CS2 it is over 50% obvious cheaters in every single "skill level". NO REASON to play any online fps.

[@azmalguthek4502]

@@Rpgreat Blanket statements are disingenuous and not intelligent. You do not know even 10% of every top 20% player in 'every single game' for even one year, let alone many. Don't exaggerate. You would not be able to prove even a dozen cases definitively without googling people who were already exposed with any indisputable evidence. That being said, yes, cheating in competitive fps is at an all time high. As technology develops more and more, so will cheats. And AAA publishers don't feel it necessary to invest in proprietary solutions worth their salt.

[@Divinity_vA]

@victorwallin9282 So, can we see the statistics or? If you come up with made up numbers/percentages you better have some evidence to back it up. Such blanket statements sounds like nothing but seething just because you're bad at video games therefore everyone else must be cheating aka skill issue. Granted, CS2 has a major issue and so did CSGO when it comes to regular Matchmaking but your numbers are ridiculously inflated, you also assume many professional players cheat and you have nothing to back it up. I hope you come back to re-read your comment in a year or two and see just how ridiculous it sounds. "I am good, its everyone else that is cheating" is such a next level cope.

[@orangastang5291]

As someone who develops EFI and DMA firmware and chairs this video is stupidly accurate. Good job man. The amount of top players across all games from csgo to fortnite to cod that use DMA is way way more than you think. I can name 3 million subscriber + who have inquired in dma cheats.

[@orangastang5291]

Only thing i will add is now you can get dma cards for 150 and firmware for the card custom 1:1 for 25-50. The cheats arent at all detectable yet and only detections have been from shitty firmware not the cheats used themselves, mass copied and distributed firmware. Cheats for dma cards barely ever exceed 100 a month, saying they are 500+ in this video is complete cap, there less that needs to go into them due to the safety of the dma card. Since 2018 i can name a few rust few fortnite few cod and a few r6/valorant that have been UD never detected yet.

[@peterfischer2039]

@@orangastang5291 I mean, a good player only needs slight assistance to be insanely good, a bad player needs so much assistance that it starts to get obvious. That is part of the reason why bad players will get banned much more often, even after a manual review.

[@wompa164]

you should out them

[@sa1t938]

@@wompa164 hes a cheat developer why would he do that lol

[@Schniebel89]

I call "reducing ragehackers to triggerbots" a win in my book. The only thing I don't understand is how cheaters don't get quickly bored of the game since there is no challenge. Same goes fo ppl who buy boosted accounts and such.

[@luizmourabr]

Because apparently annoying other people never get old to them

[@oskartu12]

It might sound delulu for somebody that didn't try to cheat in valorant (and i hope u won't), but if u are gonna just use pixelbots - game DOESN'T become 100% winrate easymode. Game is easier and less stressful (since u don't have to warmedup as much) yes but u still have to be accurate... Just a bit less so. Rage hacking in matchmaking on the other hand is just ruining ppls day and being open about it.

[@V1replade]

well I want spin botters because its obvious. The problem with triggerbots in cs 2 is like is the game buggy, did I have a lag spike and therefore he could see me earlier etc... so its not fully clear.

[@OfficialMyMindset]

i've noticed that some the of the cheaters that hve been caught that do this kind of stuff do it to get into "pro circles" and try get into pro teams and orgs. They create an online profile, make online friends and get hype as the next big cracked player and then they can be noticed by orgs and pros. Essentially getting their foot in the door. Ofcourse they have to already be decent at the game already. Thats why alot of players that go to pro lan Tournament and suddenly don't do as good as normal are considered "suss". This is being talked about now in Warzone and to a lesser degree Apex Legends.

[@alan_e_]

@@OfficialMyMindsetall professional players are already cheating

[@jacksonc7951]

the ai voice is uncanny

[@worldeater3242]

Literally says it’s hard for her to speak cause she got into an accident but go off I guess

[@TheStiepen]

I don't mind it at all. The animated avatar is a bit creepy though.

[@tuduscz6836]

I can't even imagine how much effort and research this video cost. Excellent work and thank you for this. (and also thanks KZbin algorithm for recommending me this)

[@Alfred-Neuman]

Right? She has been cheating for years just to make this video! I'm joking lol I was surprised she only having 3k subs, it's the most detailed video I watched on this subject. Very interesting stuff.

[@Hege_]

Doesn't take much if you've been in the cheating scene for years.

[@ajnart_]

@@Alfred-Neuman its an AI voice lmao

[@hahaid2003]

The research has been done since the earliest hacking days. This is knowledge, experience and time.

[@fRy9n]

This video is what the FPS League community has needed for years. The online community and even LAN community has been corrupted by these hardware “hacks” for years. I have over 12k hours in cs and the amount of hardware cheating in cs and in the start of 2016 onward is disgusting. I’ve gone from a solid 2.2-k elo faceit level 10 down to level 6-7 1500 elo. The game i play is being ruined. The top 10% of of esea advanced+ is using something online for an edge. I personally know players in faceit / ESEA cheating in league play with simple cheats. Completely undetected, no game file or memory being accessed just “simple” mouse and keyboard emulation with pixel bots activating Aimbot and trigger for them. I know a few top level players who actively cheated the entire time they played in upper tier CS leagues it’s disgusting. I just want AI anti cheat enabled already. Yes there will be a lot of innocent good players caught in the crosshairs at first and it won’t be easy in the beginning but something has got to give. I’m 31 and still dream of playing on a good “high level team” but this community has only devolved since I started playing.

[@WKMasterGamer]

this is a very rare video I've watched, never ever get the feeling that these "smurfs" on immo lobbies could be just good but now with this in line, I have so many questions than answers. Earned a sub, your content is great!

[@kimjunguny]

val is still smart most of the cheaters are in d3-low immo. break through this and you should be free of cheaters. below higher immo and you are consistently stuck in the cheater/smurf elo hell.

[@IroAppe]

Halfway through the video, I wanted to write, that the next step would be to go hardware, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, except require users to also have specific hardware that scans the memory bus for additional access that is not allowed. But at that point, you could even build custom hardware that fakes those hardware security measures to be there to the anticheat engine. And when you said that it has to be on another computer with a monitor, I thought, you could in theory create something so you can overlay them on one monitor - and of course such hardware already exists and people are already doing it? Holy moly, how deep is the cheating scene in? Crazy.

[@IroAppe]

But I also wonder, who goes so far as to spend thousands just to cheat in a shooter game? Like, why go that far? It is interesting on a technical level, but I don't understand why someone does this.

[@Dio_07]

The AI voice over is way too hard on the S sounds, its making my tinnitus really flare up.

[@tigerchills2079]

When I first tinkered with an FPGA dev board during my Electrical Engineering program, I did not only see a Video output, but also a Video input. That's where my brain clicked: "oh no. hardware cheating is a thing."

[@elchinuoficial]

Beware man, Riot is taking down every video super critical of Valorant by smaller creators. Sometime ago someone made a video about the Valorant matchmaking system, basically explaining how it was rigged with the famous EOMM paper and some Riots patents. Case in point, video is now no longer available, I'm sure Riot is even more sensitive about their AC and cheating problem as they also delete those post on the Valorant subreddit and deny everything. Otherwise excelent video, one of the best ones about the topic.

[@unityresearch]

Thanks, yeah I know they've been super aggressive, but I intend to fight if they try anything. Everything I'm doing is investigative reporting.

[@Unended]

@@unityresearchmake sure to reupload this cuz this was very eye opening

[@CathrineMacNiel]

@@unityresearch Heck yeah, fight the good fight. The broad unaware playerbase need to know about this.

[@sharpasacueball]

Yeah that sounds exactly like what Riot would do. Anyone who's even glanced at league of legends knows this

[@Ghostyl]

this video is basically an advertisement for the extreme value of vanguard tho, it isn't really critical. it eliminates most blatant cheats and your avg cheater isn't buying hardware, no matter how cheap it is, or installing some cracked os. The solutions to the remaining cheats is to combine it with counter-strike's ai replay anti-cheat as that runs on their servers with no way to bypass it on your own hardware but that's only for the very tiny remaining amount. give me this in cs2 already

[@theunwantedson]

valorant players: give us replay system valo devs : duh thats gonna show how many cheaters in our game we don't do that

[@randomizednamme]

Great summary! As a developer with no experience in using cheats or writing cheats, here are my thoughts: client-side anti cheat is ALWAYS circumventable. Devs need to be doing more server-side statistical anti-cheat. Basically detecting if a player is consistently having superhuman reactions. It is trickier if players are toggling cheats, but you could look for extreme deviations in play which would also detect account sharing. If I were to develop a cheat it would go as following: 2 PCs with display-out of the clean PC going into the dirty PC, a micro controller that spoofs a mouse, with your real mouse connected to it. Mouse movement is more easily detectable via statistical analysis so this will only be a trigger bot. The second computer would use either pixel color or a neural net (in games with no outline) to detect enemy players and could trigger fire when your cursor hovers them. It could delay shooting to human reaction times, but faster than your own. You would play as normal but the cheat would inject shots that you may not take. I think this would yield a solid advantage while remaining pretty undetectable even by statistical analysis, not too tricky to program, and would work across games.

[@markslater1081]

This already exists. Its called aimmy and is designed for players with disabilities. It uses neural nets to see players then moves the mouse and pulls the trigger.

[@Corrade_]

Great comment. From a cursory review of your reply and those of others, two promising anti-cheat paths feel natural to me: a) server-side statistical analysis to combat aim cheats, and b) minimizing enemy positional data that's sent to clients to combat radar/wallhack cheats. Neither solution is complete, but it seems like they'd at least limit the effectiveness of cheats. For example, as you illustrated, aim cheats would still exist, but they'd have to produce feasible results to remain undetected. Perfect aimbots would be eradicated. Likewise, wallhacks would still pick up on enemy positions in advance since those would have to be transmitted early to buffer for ping jitter. But at least full-map detection would be impossible. I guess the question is whether or not these partial victories would actually make the situation much better. Like, who cares if an enemy is using an aimbot that grants them pro-level aim instead of perfect aim? They'd still be intolerably annoying.

[@Zeldrake]

​@@Corrade_ A server-side "Oh, this player is through a wall, therefore I do not need to send you data on their position as your camera would not see it" sounds like a fantastic way to get around it

[@FelixNothus]

This is such an excellent made video. I clicked on it intending to watch for a few minutes and get back to coding and then I just couldn't stop watching it, the presentation is well done and everything you say is absolutely gripping. I can't believe you're just a small channel you deserve a huge audience for this.

[@IAmJonesty]

Love this, would appreciate more in depth dives on understanding cheating/hacks and the culture!! I grew up in the same era as you and this feels personal lol.

[@Panchorinion]

Little to no one takes the cheating culture as serious as this video. Ironically, moralization on the act of cheating impedes the understanding of the act itself, and the motivations of those who cheat. Would also love to see that as well.

[@OtjPlateo]

as a Software Dev who does not play FPS, I absolutely enjoyed this information dense video.

[@VioletGiraffe]

Amazing. I was expecting a deep dive into kernel-level programming, and still couldn't believe a ring 0 anti-cheat wouldn't detect whatever you might do. You side-stepped the problem nicely. The microcontroller/SBC solution is something even I could create myself, alone. Really simple, and scarily effective. Good thing I don't play Valorant. Bad thing is all the MP shooters I loved are now long riddled with cheaters, and i don't mean the subtle kind.

[@kipchickensout]

The last few years of CS:GO and most of my CS2 playing has been cheater free (as far as I could tell) which is probably due to trust factor, as well as not playing above LE

[@TheSuperappelflap]

You dont need to do all that, you can just point a camera at your screen. Using an off the shelf computer vision AI model like for example YOLO to detect enemies bounding boxes and some aimbot algorithms to control curves and acceleration on a 2nd PC, and plug the output of that into a HID device on the first PC. There you go, fully automated aimbot undetectable by kernel level anti cheat with very little programming involved. People have already demonstrated that this works. All you have to do is walk around and the game plays itself.

[@TwistedFireX]

@@TheSuperappelflap the lengths ppl go just to automate "skill". whats the point anymore, mfps' have been raped by loser devs whos only goals are to make money/create a portfolio at the expense of legitimate player's hobbies.

[@TheRailroad99]

great video, subscribed! As an embedded and FPGA dev I especially liked the DMA/MCU attempts. Very interesting as I always suspected these exist, as they are in theory possible. Another (yet much more complicated, if not currently impossible) but in theory possible attack vector would be to spoof the RAM itself (access to the DDRx Bus - But especially with DDR5 that would need a VERY fast FPGA to get it working reliably. It would however be completely undetectable.

[@jpoprules23]

for escape from tarkov a few of these exist. im not sure of the purpose of original hardware that was used for this but it essentially functioned like a DMA but on a single computer. it would know when the game was using the memory. the device looked like a ram extender and would show up as another device. the cheat would then read the data that was associated with the player data or loot data in tarkov and then overlay on the users screen.

[@robigan]

Perhaps Chinese made RAM with programmable FPGAs built in that give access to the physical RAM device itself?

[@jpoprules23]

im not that versed on the subject, ive just seen photos of someone running there ram after there was some sort of passthrough. it was supposed to be completely undetectable because it didnt even register on the system, just skimmed the data going to and from ram. the friend who showed it to me supposedly installed it for several prominent streamers on tarkov@@robigan they would fly the guy out and everything.

[@Macatho]

I think what's underestimated is the complexity of making these work, I find it 100x more impressive what the cheaters are doing than what valorant devs are doing. Digging in RAM using a DMA is fucking annoying tedious work.

[@Panchorinion]

Overkill engineering, I love it hahahah. My completely ignorant guess is that it's hard to capture ram data without tampering, and therefore you have to rely on intermediary hardware that is detectable by anticheat, as @jpoprules23 says. However, there is maybe a chance with a server motherboard with a multiple CPU and ram lanes, but I'm maybe talking nonsense.

[@morpitz7188]

This video is so wonderfully made, genuinely impressive. Only rarely do video-essays capture me. Yours truly did. Good job!!! Im excited to see more coming from you. You earned urself a subscription

[@SinnerD2010]

The amount of effort and ingenuity going on with cheat development is insane. I'd be willing to bet some developers are backend developing the cheats or selling info to developers about potential work arounds, new age under the table work. Some of these work arounds seem far too complex and specific to the problem to just be oppsied upon. I blame the monetization of competitive gaming for the current gaming environment.

[@thegreatest9578]

One of the most informative videos about cheating i have ever seen. Makes me a bit sad to be honest do people just don't care anymore. Whats the point of playing, what is with the joy of combat to overcome yourself getting better and better until ur at the top. Im playing shooters for like 15 years will be 25 this year, i would rather die than cheat. What happend with people did they lost their love for games. just because other cheat u have to do it too?! No u gave up, u gave urself up, u gave ur dream up becoming the best and now ur just a broken shell of a gamer that a little brother wouldn't ever be proud of. god damn it man (not talking to unity in the last part i went a little emotional for the topic i guess.) i hope some feels the same, who ever reeds this hope u doing good, life i rough sometimes, keep urself up.

[@dahahaka]

At this point the enjoyment stems primarily from circumventing anti-cheat, if there was no anti cheat the only thing that would change is that more of them would be script kiddies (literally) and rage hackers So it would be more visible, but the same amount of cheating in total :D it would be funny if it weren't so sad

[@psydemekum]

What an amazing documentary! Sadly, there's a significant lack of discussion about cheats. When I gathered information on cheaters in Mordhau (who use the same usernames in a cheat forum as they do in the game) and posted it on Reddit, I was immediately banned for a month. It seems any information related to cheats, even discussing their functions, is off-limits. This raises a question: how can players recognize they're up against cheaters if they're unaware of the existing cheats and how they operate? Consequently, accusations of cheating are often met with disbelief. Typical responses include 'they're just smurfs', 'they're genuinely skilled', 'there's no point in cheating in xxxx', or even 'there are no cheats available for xxxx'. Thank you for this enlightening report.

[@Macatho]

Devs don't want to be spammed by players creating false reports...

[@kata1000]

As a data scientist who also enjoys gaming, I’ve just realized that my understanding of computers is like playing a game on the easiest level. There’s so much to learn in the low-level world, and it’s crazy

[@gecko_ecco2017]

What a superb video. With a long background in fps games and great interest in computer science I must recommend you for this video. It has clear explanation, a interesting structure and just the right depth to interest people newer to fps as well as veterans, may I say so even people that confronted with these topcis daily. Thank you very much for doing this, it looked very professional. You should definitly have more than 9000 subscribers, so I am trying to help out it that regard. Keep it up

[@IMarsiii]

The "Alive" CS 1.6 Edit short scene in the video GOSEBUMPS!

[@realtimestatic]

Honestly I'd never install Valorant or any Rootkit on my PC since I value my privacy a lot. I could ever only imagine it on a secondary game just for spyware like this. Interesting to see how people get around it relatively cheaply. The DMA method seems to be really complicated but also sophisticated in how powerful it is. I use Linux anyways and don't understand for casual players why they would allow just a game to get so much data on them while being a blackbox to what it does and what it sends to the user. People will always hack if they want to but personally I play for fun and manual reviewal and server side anticheat are enough for me tbh. Thank you for going in so much detail and taking the time to explain thoroughly! I understand why people are concerned but I don't like being forced to use it when friends want to play a game with me because I'll always refuse a mere game to have such deep access

[@samuelemarro1970]

So glad to see this video back! Definitely one of the most in-depth and well-produced videos on this topic (or to be fair, any kernel-level OS security topic) I've ever seen

[@SwissExperiments]

Thank you for making this video, as an engineer AND a CS:S community owner I find this extremely interesting. I've dabbled with making cheats too out of pure technological interest and I strongly believe that the art of reverse engineering and writing cheats is one of the strongest skills out there. I hate cheaters but I envy those that have the knowledge to write good cheats.

[@Creomortis]

Reverse engineering is a brilliant skill but lets not applaud people using these skills to cheat in games, its childish and pathetic.

[@SwissExperiments]

@@Creomortis what's childish and pathetic is using the final product perhaps. Definitely not the making of it.

[@ohanski]

Honestly have to say I am pleasantly suprised at the sheer quality of this video. Everything down to the cuts,timing,script and edits (many more things) are just amazing feels like a proffesional that has done a lot of videos before very engaging throughout!!! Also the boosting topic does deserve a video in and of its self.

[@WereCatStudio]

I was just talking to my friend on Discord about how LoL won't soon run on Steam Deck because of Vanguard when I opened YT 2min later and had this in my recommended videos (Google must have been listening, lol). Needles to say. I think this is the best video I've seen in quite a while on this matter. I really appreciate the knowledge and effort you put into this, instant sub.

[@GoofyStyle7457]

Thank you for putting it back! I wanted to show this to my coworkers a few months ago but it was down. Just happened today to check if it was up and it was!

[@Fan_of_Ado]

Noticed the AI voice immediately and was a bit skeptical mostly due to the GPT-driven SEO farms these days. What a pleasant surprise. Just technical enough that it was interesting while still high level enough not to lose focus.

[@GeFeldz]

The most disheartening thing is that cheaters are actually paying to ruin the game for everyone else. Some people are just so far gone.

[@jammingcat21]

Same. You need to question your existence if you’re willing to recompile Windows then make custom firmware for your devices then spend a grand for a separate PC…… to cheat.

[@Mikkel111]

Correct, but also not really.. At least inaccurately worded. People pay to *seem* like they're great at the game. The consequence of that being ruining the experience of others.

[@kuhluhOG]

@@jammingcat21 there a three types of people who do this: the ones who do it for the challenge and a test of technical skill (by far small than the others) the ones who do it for the money (they normally sell the cheats) the ones who do it to "feel superior"

[@dahahaka]

​@@jammingcat21not to cheat but to earn money, remember what was said about boosting services etc.

[@alan_e_]

The only way to get out of it is stop playing these addictive multiplayer games.

[@miroaja1951]

Now that riot is adding vanguard to league this topic is ever more relevant

[@PuissantPeacock]

"The only winning move is... not to play." ~Joshua, War Games 😅

[@veRGe02]

I've been playing CS since 2002. Played CAL and ESEA and eventually Valo too. Been playing CS2 with old friends lately. This video was both informative but miserably depressing. I guess there just isn't much legit players can do to avoid all these cheaters. I just want to avoid all the pathetic sadboys cheating when I play games. Sucks there is no way to do so.

[@GSicKz]

a great video indeed, i guess the only thing you can do if you want to play FPS games online is switch to console ... chances of running into hackers is i guess much much smaller there compard to even the most protected servers on pc

[@JustKelsey]

⁠@@GSicKz um no its not.

[@GSicKz]

@@JustKelsey why not?

[@JustKelsey]

@@GSicKz you'd be surprised at how many cheaters there are on console

[@GSicKz]

@@JustKelsey yea perhaps you are right, anyways i think that game publishers should at least implement Phone number verification and i would suggest even passport/ID checks to play on "verified" servers to cut down on this huge issue. Currently it is estimated by anybrain that around 20-30% are cheating, I think by doing passport verification this would reduce drastically. I wont go back to playing FPS games until this huge issue is solved anyway

[@xtremefurrycat]

There is an anti cheat system out there that doesn't need kernal or invasive software to be on the device. Instead it records things like reaction time and other game behavior to do a bit of a profile fingerprint of the cheater. So it's an AI system a lot like chatgpt but it runs data checks in real time to find the cheater just on how they play. Certain things like human reaction time plays a factor here as well as hit spots on someone. I just wonder how long it will be until that is rolled out and to see how cheaters will overcome that.

[@taquanminhlong]

The winner is the one who doesn't play the game 😂😂😂

[@rodney8075]

Wow. Somebody finally did a legitimate video showcasing all the ways to get past kernel driver anti cheats. You did an amazing job producing this video the quality is S tier. The narration is great too. I love that you used a calm level headed voice throughout.

[@DocRekd-fi2zk]

And this is why the only good anticheat is a server side anti cheat

[@EMICproductons]

I do not comment on videos often, but this documentary has been amazing to watch - amazing TTS as well!

[@Ren4issanc3]

What TTS is used here, it's actually the best I've heard in a while.

[@natec1]

@@Ren4issanc3 Not sure if this is what it is, but ElevenLabs is really good

[@sunviewer7]

@@Ren4issanc3ElevenLabs AI audiobook voice

[@XSFlanger]

Great to see your hard work reinstated!

[@c0nk2879]

You should've titled this video: Why you should quit competitive FPS games

[@Delicioushashbrowns]

One of the best videos on this topic that I’ve ever seen and will likely ever see. I hope you’re working on more because your content is insanely good and your storytelling is compelling

[@Gem-gi7km]

Not only the content of the video is very educational, but the video production quality is insane. Keep up the production quality, and I am certain this channel will blow up!

[@JimTheScientist]

I haven’t seen someone who actually researched the hardware security and digital security topics this well talking about kernel level anti cheats. I am an OS developer, and I understand how hard most of those concepts are for developers to learn how they actually work. I also am surprised at how you managed to cover most of the types of cheats and didn’t just say what they can and can’t do but actually showed how they work.

[@m_0rx]

did not expect a high quality video like that amazing work amazing music and perfeect explanation of "things" keep it up

[@arghnews]

Absolutely awesome video So incredibly informative, fascinating, and the production quality is top tier As a game dev who's messed about with raspberry pis, esps and other microcontrollers, I hadn't even thought about them being used for this kind of thing. Thanks for the video, really hope you make more, I'd love to watch them

[@ignacioariellopez8491]

8 minutes into the video, and i've gotta say, probably one of the best carefully edited videos/documentary i've seen here for a long time. Havent finished yet, but since the very start you got me intrigued, without skipping a single second of it (Which is pretty rare for me as I, at least i think, have some kind of TDAH traits) and having a sense of nostalgia all through my body. Well fking done, it amazes me that you only have 2k subs. Definetely earned one more right now.

[@tesco-cs]

i remember back in 2004/5 on cs 1.6 a cheat called Furious SP was big and each time it got detected a new version would be created.. i miss them days playing in internet cafes

[@quantum5768]

This is an awesome video, as a casual gamer (at least these days) that's also a firmware engineer, it was nice to see the crossover in an easy to approach way. You've also demystified what the hell the DMA capture cards I keep seeing on aliexpress are for, I work with FPGAs quite often but I had just assumed they were an industrial oddity.

[@ajnart_]

The AI voice, the chatgpt-esque script with edgy humour and the vocabulary about the chinese rootkit, this video is perfect.

[@azaldie]

There will always be cheaters and cheats that can bypass AC, but the whole point of it is that the more complicated you make the process for people to cheat effectively, the more people will decide "not worth the effort/cost" and either play legit or just stop playing - result being the same, 1 less would-be cheater.. Excellent video!

[@domosapien]

True. It's a variant of what's called Deterrence Theory. It's the same reason why no one should necessarily feel safer with the deadbolt on their door which has a very low impact tolerance on most apartment doorways. The deadbolt isn't there to stop a true criminal with the wherewithal and conviction to commit a crime. It's there to deter petty criminals which are much more common and more dangerous. However, despite knowing that fact, we feel safe sleeping in our home at night due to another objective reality - we're not likely to be the target of anything. It doesn't mean it can't happen, but the likelihood of it is very slim. It's fine to be prepared, but sitting in abject fear every day is not how we commonly function, nor should it be.

[@newdiary6978]

You got it right. But using arduino to cheat is still cheap and easy. Anyone can still use it if he wants to 😬

[@PsychoKaedeMode]

I don't know man, i feel like at the point where you literally have to install a fucking rootkit to try to prevent cheating it's already gone to far. Fuck that shit

[@johnson5725]

But listen to the ridiculous level of this people. They have all this work, just to have an advantage over clean players, and eventually, win. Without it, they could never do it. It’s ridiculous. Weak human beings, cheat. I would give much more props to a silver player trying to learn the game and being bad and committing mistakes than a top cheater.

[@TheSuperappelflap]

Theyll just go cheat in a different game where its slightly easier, unless they have the money to buy a cheat advanced enough, or the IT skills to make one. This means less cheaters, but it also means the quality of the cheaters you do get will be very high and it will be very hard to catch them.

[@suamesys]

Hearing about the lengths cheaters go through just to cheat in games really make you wonder why they wouldn't just spend the time getting good at the game instead

[@purple7filth]

From what I've heard & seen, it's cause they know they'll never play at a professional level but still want to feel like one.

[@Ren-kei]

Thank you for your channel I've covered some of these subjects with people in real life a lot of the time to explain how cheating is actually rampant in gaming ,to have someone else put it in a great format and explain it as well is super helpful and productive and now people are more likely to believe us and understand the truth. It's surprising that a lot of people wouldn't believe me because it wasn't in video format, so thank you for putting it in video and doing great job at the technical analysis!

[@raffertymetcalfe]

paying thousands of dollars and doing all this JUST to cheat in Valorant is MENTAL. There is no way these people make more money from this than they would putting the same amount of work an actual job. Great video, hope you heal up soon

[@lx2222x]

You don't need to put in thousands of dollars, 50$ should be enough as a starter kit. If you want to go extra safe (with VM and GPU passthrough) you need better PC performance / equipment

[@somo4227]

if i had the money i would do it just to see valorant burn

[@vetrixfx9264]

I think the cheat devs don't really cheat in games to be 'good' in the game, but as a challenge for themselves on how to circumvent those anti-cheat measures. Same deal with people who create cracks or mod consoles. The people who only cheat and don't write them themselves tho, I really don't get their motivation. Yeah cheating can be fun for a short while, but then it just gets boring. I myself used to cheat on Minecraft PvP servers because I wanted to see how crazy I could go, but after I reached the limits with my downloaded cheats, I moved on and played normally again lol

[@Satanperkele]

You clearly didn't watch the entire video before commenting

[@inkiblackman2625]

Was waiting for a follow up after your last one… looking forward to more, very informative!

[@brawldude2656]

I love how we go deeper and deeper and after there isn't any deeper we just jump back to the most basic highest level the visual cheats

[@_APV_]

Great video, I always wondered about how people managed to avoid the kernel AC. I remember when Valorant first entered open beta, and on the very first day there was a guy with wallhack already streaming, lol. Also nice job with the AI voice! Usually I instantly notice it, since it annoys me for some reason, and I can't listen to even a short video with it, but this one is relatively human-like, by the end of the video I was only 80 or 90 % sure it was an AI, but 10-20% were on that you're a professional caster/commenter/singer who just can speak for a long time with very little variance and emotion.

[@foxxy46213]

Same I hate ai narration but if I hadn't seen the post about using it I wouldn't have probably noticed

[@berni5192]

As someone quite experienced in PC hardware, this is a VERY good video. Very detailed even for beginners. Love the video. Been sharing to my friends and in some of my discord servers.

[@tvojamamaomg]

wow i didnt expect the video to be this good... great points that often get overlooked, some stuff for everyone regardless of their knowledge on the subject, good edits

[@thechroniclesofcriss942]

as a friend of mine recently told me, more sophisticated mousetraps make more sophisticated mice.

[@rac34125]

Appreciate the quality video, it was interesting to watch you delve into this and explain it in a fairly easy to understand way for someone who doesn't have any experience in online shooters and has a mild understanding of PC and microcontrollers. What I also find hilarious is part of my recommendations to watch next on this video is one posts 3 days ago titled "Best Valorant Aimbot Undetected [NEW UPDATE ..."

[@sensecbc]

Incredible content. No idea who you are but you've earned my sub. 40 minutes and I've learned so much. Great voice as well. Keep it coming

[@raptorcheesus]

its an ai voice lmao

[@shakingitoff]

honestly this makes pro players so impressive. to be able to consistently hit numbered ranks in an environment where every other game has some kind of cheater is seriously impressive.

[@peckop1793]

It makes you have to minmax your strategy and crosshair placements.

[@Malam_NightYoru]

​@@peckop1793It also makes you fear if none of the are cheating with an arduino inside the mouse, and the USB response being made in the same port as the mouse movement. But yeah.

[@Stoney3K]

The only anti-cheat method that is left is to detect cheaters based on heuristics, meaning that everyone who is "too good" compared is suspected to be a cheater. But the major downside of this is that legitimate players who are *actually* good at the game will also be banned as cheaters -- for the simple reason that their behavior is often indistinguishable from cheaters. It's the same dilemma faced by DRM developers: Trying to thwart people from committing piracy while not making legitimate uses impossible.

[@StankeyWang]

This is one of the most well made, well articulate/thoughtout, and interesting video ive seen on this platform. Amazing work!

[@Filozs]

This was really well made video. You explained essential things clearly with pausable explanatory pictures. I am looking forward to your future videos. Keep it up!

[@OatsMealz]

Valorant, 4 years later still no replay system tells you all you need to know

[@thamzamnamthejellyman100]

Ive been aware of quite a bit of this for some time. I'd often tell people "Look at how long fps games have been in development. Do you really think the cheating industry is that far behind? Look at the olympics. When thousands and millions are on the line, cheating of some kind will always be nearby" It's nice to have the details broken down in such an orderly and well explained manner. Excellent video, i'll will be sharing this around for sure. Thanks for the time and effort you've put in for the side of competitive integrity in modern fps gaming.

[@addictedyounoob3164]

This is some top notch 11/10 quality liquid gold video. Thanks for making this detailed explanation of how this all works. Incredible work. I'm completely stunned.

[@Katastrophe9009]

Players who actually have skill: "Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power."