How Do Hackers Actually Cheat In Games? 

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I genuinely love how you have taken your channel in the last few months. Massive fan. It’s spot on. Clear, educational.

"he's turned himself into chunklets!"

Are you still me? I created a wallhack for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for educational purposes. Then I created an anticheat for the community based on my experience. I learned a lot about cheat techniques and detecting injections into an executable this way. Highly recommend experimenting with this!

Would love to see a video on "external" wallhacks where instead of injecting code you read process memory to determine the locations of players and draw an overlay over the game window.

Every time you end a line you give the camera this absolutely incredulous look before the cut, I love it. I mean this entirely positively, it's got a charm to it.

I love the format/style of your videos. Really easy to follow and see where you're thinking. Not to mention the topics themselves are super interesting

Let's make this game a popular sport again! I have been playing all the Unreal games recently. The original Unreal game simply called Unreal has features that the other games don't have, such as a completely different weapon set (terran weapons) that you can alternate between by double tapping the number keys, a weapon that can grow, plants that can grow, and of course an entire single-player/co-op campaign. Please mod all the features of Unreal into Unreal Tournament

Your channel has become one of my favorites. This content is incredibly entertaining and educational. Watching you navigate all of this with such ease is extremely fascinating

I'm sure there have to be ways to verify the gog installer! Someone might have fingerprinted the installer with a checksum. You can check cryptographic signature on the installer executable. It won't check the appended archive data but it will check that the executable is known and not malicious. In turn the game installation, the unpacked archive data, can be by all reason checked by gog galaxy. There is no rule against owning multiple gog accounts, downloading your offline installers and using the games with galaxy after installing them.

Thanks for the great video Nathan. BTW at 11:36 what tool did you use to get the disassembly?

Nathan Baggs, Your videos always brighten my day, so I subscribed!

This channel is amazing, you should be proud of the videos you're making! Theyre something special.

Using the texture is pretty neat. This works similarly to the popular cs1.6 wallhacks. The main difference is that that game used different glBegin mode for different models. Triangle strip and fans for players and something else for everythig else. One trick I used was to split the depth buffer. Near (0-0.1) for the players and the rest for everything else. This way, players would render on top, but their vertices would still be sorted and displayed corectly.

Really good video, great job Nathan!

0:50 No need. Windows sandbox is an isolated environment with GPU acceleration

Wow, very cool! Thanks for the great videos! 🙌

Amazing. Your content is always interesting.

This was really informative!!! I really love all your videos explaining every thought process and step. It's really educational!! Thank you!

Never seen it done this way before. It's always finding the player entity then using reclass to find everything from there.

I'd love to see a video on cheating devices like the XIM and MSI Meg, and more importantly, if there's anything anti-cheats could do to stop such devices.

Love your channel. Keep the fun stuff up

For anyone interested, the goty edition of unreal tournament is actually available to be bought thru steam, at least last i checked it was :)

sometimes i run UT just to have fun on ctf-face by myself. Jesper Kyd is awesome

Loving this!

I don't know enough to know how much I do not understand, but I understand enough to like these videos and learn something.

I dont understand a thing but still watching every video of yours. This game patching and mod loaders making sure needs a lot of skills. It always interested me but seems like it takes years to be that good

Awesome Video!

I never thought of dumping all of Ghidra's output into a file and searching for the offsets/sizes! I've had a hell of a time trying to reverse engineer some file formats in an old game that recently got a PC release (Baulder's Gate Dark Alliance) and this actually helps! The issue I've run into is that the app doesn't process the files, like, at all. It blindly loads the data into memory and then immediately starts using it. How would you go about reversing something like that?

Very cool. Thanks!

What about replacing all textures with semi translucent ones?

iirc, unreal engine games from that time got wallhacks made using the same game engine by making a module specifically for it. You didn't need to hack the binary executable or inject code into it because it would be loaded as a game module or mod for the game, so it was much easier. There were anti-cheats that actually verified your game modules and checked if you were using something sketchy tough. All in all, it's more fun to learn to play the game and actually play it, but of course it's always interesting to learn how to inject yourself into other processes because what you can learn from this, you can apply to other kind of attacks. Like this is totally not usefull for reverse engineering and bypassing any kind of intelectual property protection ;) (and also modding other games)

part of the reason the vm performance was so poor was that you may not have loaded the virtual box graphics drivers. The little turtle icon on the bottom bar means there is some issue with how it is emulating on the host. Usually installing the guest edition CD fixes the performance for me. You may also need to disable some virtualization based security settings or TPM. Not sure if those impact the sandboxing capabilities of the VM

I really need your help with one game, sir 😂 but thanks about this vid 🙏

I'm really enjoying all of your reverse engineering videos. I hope you keep them up! :)

Unreal Tournament forever! UT2004 is my favorite but 99 is great too.

Fantastic vid, loved that game.

Excellent video! Gives a great glimpse into the world of cheating in multiplayer games. I guess most of us never knew how these were made!

I was so pleasantly surprised when you said you were going to try it on Unreal Tournament, such fond memories of this game. Awesome vid as always Nathan :)

Why not use Interlocked intrinsics to swap pointers? No need to suspend the threads

You got this in the bag(gs) Sorry, couldn't resist. Fun video though, always neats to see you dive in and fiddle with internals. 👍

That is not my area of programming, but, can games make the information of other players be withheld in the server and only if a player finds another player the server says "yes, you are indeed seeing the enemy in accord with my withheld information", and then, only then, give the client the information of the enemy's position? In that case, the client wouldn't ever know the information needed to find other players, only the server. I may be talking something impossible, or something that may be computationally intensive for the server or whatever, like i said, it is not my area, but i got curious about that.

Love the video as always. In your code listings, it has the symbol ≠. Is that just a simplification for the video or is it valid code?

hmm in a vm u can use gpu passthrough? level1techs showcased it. 1 host alot of different vm's and even modern 3d load. vdi/virtual desktop infrastructure. maybe for next future projects :P

The later unreal tournament games are the ones that spawned the "cheating industry". It's pretty interesting how it all started

"And Windows does nothing from pulling the rug out from under yourself". No Operating system does.

Cool idea to find the player via the OpenGL calls, wouldn't have thought of that. Probably would be more difficult with a more modern game, because there would be way more textures to go through, but it's way more fun than doing everything the same way every time :D Keep up the good work!

"Best FPS map of all time" Amen!

Really interesting!

Would have been educational to see the reverse engineering part of code also. Btw can you take a game that doesn't support windowed mode and make video where you show how to make a windowed mod. I mean yea there are generic programs out there that can run any DirectX game windowed but what's the absolute minimum required reverse engineering and coding to make let's say Warcraft 2 run windowed mode?

Man that video was super cool! Now I want to try to do the same x)

Just a hopeful request, how about using Linux to hack instead of windows?

1:00 Windows sandbox 😉

You're doing such an amazing job with your videos - really enjoying your content.

Thanks!

Facing Worlds! 😍 (Great job, btw)

still impressive and fun to do this reverse engineering

I'm amazed as always

you're the coolest big bro with all the cool tricks

This was on my start page when I just scrolled by. I did a double take back because I was like "Is this Facing Worlds" from just a split second. Played that game to death

This game was the main use of our university network

CS2 HVH when?

Thumbnail facing worlds UT

HEADSHOT HEADSHOT HEADSHOT KILLING SPREEE God I didn't hear that In a while!!!

Something I've never understood is why popular online competitive games never manage to prevent people from cheating. I feel like it has to be a lot easier for the game developer to prevent cheats from working than it is for a hacker to make the cheat. Every time the developer releases a minor patch that mixes things up then the hacker has to do tons of reverse engineering so the hacker should be at a great disadvantage. Either game developers aren't trying to prevent cheats or there has to be more layers to this that I don't understand.

At some point, this problem will get so bad, that casual players who actually just want to have fun and an actual challenge, will simply stop playing these games altogether. Then that will just leave the hackers to go ahead and hack the game out of its existence! Sounds like a "wonderful" outcome! 😂😅😊

you are a genius

Sometimes cheating is the only way to fix a save file.

Time to hack The Crew.

Ruining the enjoyment of others IS the game for 18% to 22% of all multiplayer gamers. And that's being generous. It's estimated that as much as 80% of multiplayer gamers are cheating in some way online at least part of the time. Just like your siblings couldn't be trusted to run the bank in monopoly because they would steal money when no one is looking.

this is amazing thank you

Amazing peak into GL and the dark arts. Love the content!

A HACKER is an individual with technical computer skills but often refers to individuals who use their skills to breach cybersecurity defenses A CHEATER is a person who acts dishonestly in order to gain an advantage, in this case, in video games Please know the difference and correct the video title

That pipe operator at 6:05 caught me off guard. The C++20 ranges lib sure is interesting. The committee never fails to find new ways to use operator overloading!

I still play this online lol

Oh dear :)

Please keep in mind hackers and cheaters are different things

Try make fake kernel

Purely for academic reasons.

Good god seeing UT99 sent me back to my childhood, the good ol days

You should make a cheat for a another old and $hitty game that nobody plays like fortnight. Will be waiting for new video. Thanks

Well hackers need skill..cheaters are just trash people

new video!!

Disgusting how that guy makes tongue clicks all the time when speaking…. 🤮

UT never dies!!!!!

I think that it's morally justified to cheat in games where the players like to say slurs over voice chat. As punishment.

man I just won the UT99 EU 4v4 TDM Cup... I am more or less a noob and got carried by 3 veteran players but why do you teach people how to cheat... better do some helpful content -.-

and then there's games like cs that have build in wallhacks that you can activate with one wpm call

UT99 is such a good game, great video

first a virus, now wallhacks? come on now