Game developers: "You know what, I'm gonna push kernel level anticheat even harder."
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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Fair online competition has been dead for quite a while. The cheaters won. My friends and I just stopped buying and playing those games. Not as a statement, it just sorta happened over the years after dealing with the rampant cheating in, well, every competitive fps. I miss Apex, Warzone, Tarkov, etc. But game companies just do not care about solving this problem since it costs money and talent.
Competitive multiplayer games are lazy because they rely on other players to be the content. And they are perpetually vexed when their customer/ labor don't perform their intended function.
This is why I've always hated having to do pvp in a pve game for whatever reason (not often these days but mmos still sometimes) I'm bad at pvp and hate being content for other better players! I want to play a game, not be farmed for kills! Guh.
I think that's a rather shallow way of looking at. Would you describe something like chess as 'lazy' then?
A good competitive game has to put a lot of thought and care into its design to make it so that two players trying to make each other miserable actually ends up coming out the other end as a fun experience.
Chess is lazy. When you could play a real game like go.
But would @yesman@lemmy.world's statement also apply to go?
Go game devs were super lazy, couldn't even design interesting shapes for the pieces.
It's all recolored asset flips.
I hear cheat providers offer subscriptions now.
Cheats have been sub based for 20 years.
Terrible to read. So instead of going after the money, companies install kernel level "anti-cheats" that don't really do anything other than farming more data to sell?
Maybe in just one specific genre, but other kinds of competitive games do exist. It's worth noting that fighting games have never had even a single cheating scandal.
Fighting games have massive cheater problems tho...? Just cause it doesn't happen at the professional level doesn't mean that casual or ranked online play isn't full of filth.
The difference is not the genre of game, but whether it is played in person or online.
In-person fighting game tournaments are generally free of cheaters, just like in-person FPS and MOBA tournaments. The few who try to cheat in these scenarios are quite obvious, and instantly caught.
Meanwhile, online fighting game tournaments are plagued by lag switches, macros, defensive overlays, frame data mods, etc.
Don't forget the CSGO LAN cheating scandals where players were loading cheats into their mouse RAM
Pff never existed bro. Youre dreaming.
Back in like 2000 aimbotters were more plentiful than now. Some all-seeing eye privately servers lol
Youre idealising history you never experienced
This is true, online games have always been full of aimbotters and cheaters.
If they seemed less plentiful it's because of the Admin:Player ratios. Back in the day, the game company didn't host the servers they just provided you with a server executable and instructions. So any servers that you played on were paid for by a person or group and that person or group usually moderated them pretty actively.
It wouldn't be unusual to play on a server where 2/3rds of the players had the ability to kickban cheaters. Now, you're lucky if a human admin ever sees a single match that you've played.
Exactly this.
It's deeply ironic that replacing private server lobbies with "competitive matchmaking" is the direct cause of rampant cheating.
Back in the day, you'd find a server with a ping, map rotation, and culture you liked and add it to your favourites list. Then, you'd choose the server you wanted to play on.
I was a huge fan of the 24/7 Hunted server in Team Fortress Classic and a pair of Warcraft Mod Counter Strike 2 servers back in the day. Playing a night elf with life leech and the root special (prevent enemy movement for a few seconds) or an orc with up to 8× grenade damage? So much fun.
This looks a lot more practical (but less amusing) than his previous iteration, which shocked his arm muscles into aiming at the correct spot.
Saw a video about all kinds of modern cheats and once it got to cheap, easy to make hardware cheats that essentially could never be detected, I figured it was time to quit playing competitive online games. Paid for or not, the shit is super easy to do and super common to encounter even if you might not notice it because of how easy they can be to hide.
It is cheaper now, but a full DMA setup costs about as much as an entry-level PC and you need a second PC to run all of the cheats.
What he's demonstrating, using image recognition, is pretty cheap and probably even more undetectable but you 'only' get aimbotting and there is a bit of latency due to the neural network processing step. DMA cheats gives you aimbotting and all of the ESP info instantly.
The video I am talking about showed that people are just using Rasberry Pis these days to make effective undetectable aimbots, ESP, wallhacks, etc.
The class of hacks that use trained object detection networks (like YOLO) can be run on lightweight(-ish) hardware. It still needs to be able to run the object recognition loop quickly, the faster your hardware the less latency you will experience but it can work on Raspberry Pi.
In order to get ESP/wallhacks, you need to be able to read the game memory on the gaming PC. While there are software ways to do this, they are all detectable (assuming they're using Secure Boot to prevent UEFI cheats). The most reliable way is to use Direct Memory Access hardware to read the system memory via hardware without going through the operating system, which means that not even the kernel anticheats can see when this is happening.
If you're going to use ESP, you also need to be able to see the information. You could run a second monitor, but the preferred way is to use a fuser which merges two video streams, one from the game from the gaming PC and another from the PC rendering the ESP data (bounding boxes).
Then you need some kind of hardware to receive the mouse input and pretend to be a mouse to the gaming PC. This can be something like a Raspberry Pi, but a product called Kmbox is purpose designed for it.
The full hardware kit is probably around $300-400 (not counting the PC/Pi) and then you have to buy/subscribe to the software that actually runs the cheats.
They are hooking the Raspberry Pi (or other) rig to the PC playing the game directly on the bus through a $20 PCI-E device, bypassing the RAM to get and manipulate info in the game for ESP and wallhacks.
Imma have to go through my YT history and try to find that video again.
Ohhh, those are UEFI cheats. This is the reason that kernel anti-cheat games require Secure Boot.
You can, when Secure Boot is disabled, use the UEFI to load a driver that can perform DMA actions prior to loading the Windows kernel. A user could then run an innocuous piece of software that would communicate with the driver and send the data to the USB device which would run the cheat software and do the mouse manipulation (and you would configure the devices from the gaming PC over the same USB interface). e: This could technically be detected because there is still software running on the user's PC that the anti-cheat software could detect and a USB device that could, if the firmware is not properly flashed to a firmware pretending to be something innocuous (typically a NIC or Audio device).
This let anybody willing to install a UEFI driver of unknown origin have access to DMA without needing to buy an expensive card. This is only possible on any game that doesn't mandate Windows 11 and Secure Boot (though there was a recent exploit discovered with some motherboards [CVE-2025-11901, CVE-2025-14302, CVE-2025-14303 and CVE-2025-14304] that allowed an attacker to obtain DMA access prior to the IOMMU being properly initialized (which would restrict DMA access).
This would allow an attacker to run software on a second PC that would use this lapse to inject a hacked UEFI driver via a hardware DMA device, then you could just send the memory data over USB to a second cheating device.
so hardware cheats. gotcha.
might be good for those with physical impairments but will most certainly be abused by those who are just want to be better even though they aren't.
Zero chance of this becoming a real product. This is more like StuffMadeHere on YT, just making wildly impractical stuff that is still interesting.
You don't need a motorized pad, you can just run your video output and mouse through an external PC which does the image recognition and target acquisition then edits the mouse's input stream to insert the proper movement in order to hit the target, afterwards it's passed to the clean PC with the cheating PC pretending to be a mouse.
This is basically what all of the hardware cheat products do that don't use DMA access to read memory from the clean PC.
I mean yeah. He made this expressly as a way to cheat without cheating.
just because it's hardware, doesn't mean it isn't cheating
Nobody thinks this isn't actually cheating. He's under no illusions about what he has made.
Wasn’t there a computer vision cheat setup that got some attention a while back?
Yep. and there might have been one before this, I just can’t find it.