The online gaming world steps up its fight against cheating

In the space of a few weeks, several online video game publishers have stepped up their anti-cheating strategy. In February, the French studio Ubisoft unveiled Mousetrap (mouse trap), a system that penalizes, in the shooting game Rainbow Six Siege, players using fraudulent devices to aim better. Another studio, Battlestate Games, announced the banning of four thousand accounts, while by making public the pseudonyms of fraudstersafter a large-scale check on its flagship title, Escape from Tarkov. A week ago, Bungie Studios got the court conviction cheat software vendor AimJunkies, in a lawsuit filed in 2021.

This recent news illustrates the acceleration of the fight against cheating, but also the plurality of methods now used by developers to stem a ubiquitous phenomenon online. Publisher of several successful games, such as League of Legends et Teamfight Tactics, Riot Games relies on several layers of protection, the first of which is its in-house Vanguard software. This works with a « mode kernel »which gives him constant access to the heart of players’ computers and allows him to identify and stop suspicious programs, explains to the Monde Matt Paoletti, director of the anti-cheating cell of Valuing at Riot Games:

“Vanguard recently added features that block even the most advanced cheating method, namely direct memory access attacks. It is a method by which cheaters use expansion cards connected to their motherboard in order to alter the game state and the memory device, thereby bypassing the integrity checks of traditional security suites. »

Legal proceedings

Although most competitive game studios have acquired such software over the years, they are not infallible: in January, a cybercriminal put the source code of certain games online for sale of Riot Games and its anti-cheat system. The French flagship Ubisoft, equipped with the popular BattlEye and “solutions developed in-house by [ses] experts »also collaborates with “ethical hackers to prevent risks”, says Jérémy Marchadier, director of the company’s Player Safety section in Montreal. In their sights: the creators of cheating programs, which the studios do not hesitate to sue.

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