
Cheating Fortnite players are flooding the internet with malware - techi
https://www.techradar.com/news/players-cheating-in-fortnite-are-flooding-internet-with-malware
======
vivan
There are two main factors contributing to this:

1\. Cheats in video games often need to use techniques commonly used by
malware and as such are often flagged as malware. This can be things like
injecting data into other processes or reading the memory of other processes.
Also the cheats often have ways of avoiding detection by the game's actual
anti-cheat system, which again looks very much like malware trying to hide
from an antivirus.

2\. Public video game cheat sites are a great attack vector for anyone wanting
to push out actual malware. But the same can be said of any site designed to
share software that is generally considered illegal or unethical - public
torrent and other piracy sites have the same problem.

~~~
kgwxd
Anti-cheat in video games often need to use techniques commonly used by
malware too. Unfortunately, they're not flagged as often.

~~~
0942v8653
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted, as it's totally true. See the
E-Sports Entertainment, LLC case:

[https://nj.gov/oag/newsreleases13/E-Sports_Complaint_Consent...](https://nj.gov/oag/newsreleases13/E-Sports_Complaint_Consent-
Judgment.pdf)

Relevant quotes:

> Among the many monitoring activities conducted by ESEA, the ESEA Software
> was programmed to automatically capture screen shots of computers, track
> computer mouse movements, and monitor end-users' computer activities even
> when they were not logged onto ESEA servers.

> ESEA did not place any restrictions on Hunczak and Thunberg's ability to
> access end-users' computers.

> ESEA did not put policies and procedures in place to ensure its employees
> were not abusing their full administrative access privileges or
> inappropriately accessing end-users' computer files.

> From at least April 12,2013 through April 30, 2013, the ESEA Botnet used the
> GPU of end-users' computers to mine for bitcoins without notice to and
> authorization from, or in excess of authorization from, end-users.

(By "techniques commonly used by malware", I mean the data harvesting,
screenshots, and remote access capabilities exploited by the defendants.)

------
p3llin0r3
Cheating in video games is extremely common. It is a huge issue with online
video games.

I tend to be "that guy" when playing games, pointing people out when I believe
they are cheating. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. Unfortunately
it's become impossible to tell due to the sophistication of the hacks:

\- You hit a button, triggering your aim-bot, and it will swing to hit you in
a natural looking way.

\- You toggle "auto-cast" on in a moba, and suddenly your zoning becomes
completely unstoppable.

With cheap games like Overwatch and FREE games like Fortnight or League of
Legends, a ban is a very minor inconvenience. You're already paying $10/mo for
the hack, so having to re-purchase a $20 copy of Overwatch is not seen as a
huge burden. PC Bangs are popular in many cultures, so all of this might even
be included in the hourly fee you pay.

It's a crisis in the industry, where competitive online games are hugely
popular, the drive towards "balance" is obsessive, and people want to play a
fair game.

I suspect the amount cheating is a dirty secret in the industry, much more
prolific than they decide to let on. Thousands of people are banned every day.

Nobody publicly releases the number of people they ban, but you get little
nuggets of information occasionally:

\- [https://kotaku.com/pubg-banned-over-1-million-cheaters-
last-...](https://kotaku.com/pubg-banned-over-1-million-cheaters-last-
month-1822741674) ( This number was later raised to 1.5 million accounts )

OR I've adjusted my tin-foil hat to be a bit tight, and there is no issue.

~~~
sathackr
How can any of these games be fair with the all of the new pay-to-play models?

I don't play Fortnite but I see "V-Bucks" available to purchase from the
Microsoft store, so I assume it's the same.

Anyone with enough money can just go buy all the upgrades and dominate.

Maybe those cheating don't have the money to buy the gear, so they're trying
to level the field in a way that's reachable to them.

edit: apparently the pay-to-play upgrades in Fortnite are cosmetic only. Not
sure about the others.

~~~
owlninja
Just as an FYI "V-Bucks" in Fortnite only change the cosmetics of your
character, you cannot purchase an actual advantage.

~~~
sathackr
Guess that's what I get for ass-u-me-ng..

Was going off the description "...In Save the World you can purchase Llama
Pinata card packs that contain weapon, trap and gadget schematics..."

in which I took weapon, trap, and gadget schematics to mean something that
could give you an advantage.

------
13years
I'm really curious as to the degree of cheating. In one respect, there anti-
cheat system seems to actually be pretty good. Forums of such are full of
people who say they are banned and have found no way around it.

However, as a casual player, I'm amazed at how good everyone seems to be.
Everyone seems better than me. Especially at aiming. I'm one shot killed all
the time. I also casually play Quake Champions and Unreal Tournament. However,
in those games, I generally am somewhere in the middle. Most games I find at
least some people not as good as I am.

~~~
calebh
I used to do server development for a very popular free FPS game. At that time
the cheat for the game would increase the firing rate of the guns, which I
could easily detect. We started slapping on the detection script after some
testing, and it started banning tons of people. My conclusion was that the
number of cheaters in online games is ridiculously high. We never received any
complaints of false positives from players, so I believe that all the bans
were legitimate.

Detection is made more difficult by the fact that some players are actually
really good. I've been playing Fortnite for only a couple weeks now on the
Switch, and I can easily kill ~60% of players. I'm sure that with more
practice I could get within the top three pretty consistently.

~~~
annywhey
Do I know you from my pyspades days? I worked on that(Triplefox) and play
Fortnite on the daily now. We did experiment with aimbot detection with
pyspades but had false positives. Most of the featureset focused instead on
assisting with manual server moderation, which empowered the operators to make
"the game they want to play". That ultimately developed into a federated
banlist and a coalition government of operators and developers, sufficient to
deal with the population at that time. Reports of euphemistic "misbehaving
little brothers" were rife. Then the game went commercial, motivations shifted
and it all blew up.

The cheating issue in any successful game really is a case of only being able
to tame the blatant cheats down to the point of every player you encounter
being "plausibly just that good" while monitoring for the cheating software so
that a ban sweep can be done later. Pretty much every time Fortnite does a
major patch now, a wave of bans goes through and the player population
suddenly becomes much weaker.

Likewise I've gone through periods where I'll play Counter-Strike casuals and
it's even more dramatic in some respects. Players will show up in the server
and the atmosphere changes suddenly - I'll make the same kinds of plays as
before, performing apparently similarly, and yet my K/D will bottom out,
without even directly interacting with that player at all. It's like they
sucked the air out of the room, and they'll get on the voice chat and spew
garbage about how high or drunk they are right now. Then they leave and my K/D
pops right back up again.

So I've concluded that online gaming always tends towards being an illusion
world - a rough approximation of ability at best, but mostly a venue for
untrammeled predatory behavior.

I still put up with it because it really engages my masochistic tendencies to
try to "beat the cheater", and most games have techniques that let you do this
to some degree.

------
resonious
> Rainway also suggests that Epic, the company behind Fortnite, should “do a
> better job at educating their users on these malicious programs and helping
> them understand how airtight Fortnite’s systems are at preventing cheating”.

Seems like an iffy suggestion seeing as people don't listen to security-
related warnings very often [https://phys.org/news/2016-08-people-software-
percent.html](https://phys.org/news/2016-08-people-software-percent.html).
Also if some of these programs actually work as advertised, then are
Fortnight's anti-cheat systems really that airtight?

~~~
jtokoph
My problem with this statement from the article is that this kind of warning
from a gaming company will be ignored by players. Players will just
rationalize it as "they are giving a BS warning because they don't want me to
cheat".

~~~
GrumpyNl
Reset his player stats and he will get the message.

~~~
bovermyer
That's not enough.

Cheaters should be publicly outed in a way that significantly harms their
lives and discourages others from following a similar path.

Not actual violence, mind you. Something like making it more difficult to get
a job, or book a plane ticket, or similar.

~~~
cuckcuckspruce
Let me make sure I'm understanding you correctly and give you a chance to
clarify if I am misunderstanding (instead of immediately assuming the least
charitable interpretation).

Are you suggesting that cheaters in video games (not played in a competition
for money, just playing casually) should suffer career, travel, and social
consequences in the real world away from the game?

~~~
Karunamon
Why should they not? Should antisocial and deceptive behavior like this be
flatly ignored “because it’s just a game”?

~~~
Avamander
Cheating in a game should always and only be dealt with by the game company
itself. Having some real-world consequences what is quite literally
meaningless is absurd the very least. Following that train of thought, should
we start punishing people who cuss behind their consoles, PCs or phones?
That's also "bad" and "not conducive to the society".

Oh and let's not forget, if people lose more than just the satisfaction of
winning when someone steals their win with cheats I'd say they also have
issues they should deal with. In addition to that cheating in games has been a
common first step towards a good career in the field of cybersecurity, if
they'd been punished irl for cheating I'm quite certain they wouldn't be
working in that field - do we really want to go on figuratively or literally
slapping children for what really are just minor deviations from the regular?

Your train of thought is similar to those who think zero-tolerance policies
are a good idea - punishment on it's own never is.

~~~
Karunamon
> _Having some real-world consequences what is quite literally meaningless is
> absurd the very least._

"Quite literally meaningless" is a massive stretch. At the very least, you're
opening yourself up to legal hilarity (it's not cost effective to pursue
individual cheaters beyond terminating their accounts generally, but then
again, bot makers have been sued) - the reason this is a thing is that you're
ruining the service for others.

 _Oh and let 's not forget, if people lose more than just the satisfaction of
winning when someone steals their win with cheats I'd say they also have
issues they should deal with._

Please don't presume to tell other people what they should and should not find
important.

And if cybersecurity people can't learn without ruining other people's limited
downtime, perhaps we need less cybersecurity people.

~~~
Avamander
> At the very least, you're opening yourself up to legal hilarity

So the only reason it is meaningful somehow is because it's somehow legally
meaningful? That's both a bad argument for something to have irl consequences
and I heavily doubt it's correct.

> Please don't presume to tell other people what they should and should not
> find important.

I didn't say what people should find important or not, it's _how_ important
some game in someone's life should be. I think what I was trying to say is
that noone likes bad losers and sometimes losing is character-building. Better
meet people who cheat you in a pretty meaningless game rather than in real
life for the first time.

> And if cybersecurity people can't learn without ruining other people's
> limited downtime

You always have offline games.

> perhaps we need less cybersecurity people

Maybe we need less salty gamers.

