Valve has used a very interesting method to identify cheaters who try to use exploits in its popular MOBA game Dota 2. This week, the game's official web site announced that Valve has banned over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts that were discovered by basically seducing them into checking the game's data.
Valve says the exploits used by these Dota 2 accounts were able to check data that's not seen in normal gameplay. Valve says it has fixed the issued that the exploits were using, but at the same time, it also decided to get rid of the players who used them. Valve was able to identify exactly which players were using the exploit with a special patch for the game. The blog stated:
This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this "secret" area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.
Valve added that it wanted to reveal how it found these cheaters to send a warning to other players thinking they could do the same thing:
If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you're playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota. This includes professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events.
This mass Dota 2 player ban comes just after it was announced that Destiny 2 developer Bungie was awarded nearly $4.4 million by a judge in a lawsuit it filed against a cheat software group for creating and selling exploits in its sci-fi shooter.
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