University of Texas at Dallas computer scientists have devised a new weapon against video game players who cheat. Cydia cheats for all games.

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• Video Game Cheating Industry Video

The researchers developed their approach for detecting cheaters using the popular first-person shooter game Counter-Strike. But the mechanism can work for any massively multiplayer online (MMO) game that sends data traffic to a central server.

In the gaming industry there is a sub-economy for cheaters. They can purchase all kinds of digital tools to get around game rules, and even modified code to acquire special powers, like maximum. The same can be said about video games industry executives. Whether clean-shaven or bearded, besuited or smart-casual, creative or corporate, they are almost universally white and male. The growth in the Video Games industry has changed the way entertainment is consumed. With more than two billion gamers around the world, cheaters are targeting competitive online multiplayer.

• A new artificial intelligence (AI) system can detect whether a player is cheating in an online multi-player video game. A fast-growing industry with annual revenue of close to $1 billion, the.
• I’m so tired of cheaters in video games. Well, I mean, also cheaters at life, but we’re on a video game website, so today, my side-eyes are for those asshats who just keep ruining it for everyone even when they know they’re gonna get caught, like that jerk who was aimbotting so overtly in my husband’s Overwatch game last week that everyone on both teams reported him for wrecking up.

The video game industry is on the cusp of an exciting evolution: Having first transitioned to games in the digital space, now expanding to gaming across platforms and devices, the video game industry is poised to offer “gaming as a service”. Computer scientists have devised a new weapon against video game players who cheat. The researchers developed their approach for detecting cheaters using the popular first-person shooter game.

Their research was published online in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

Counter-Strike is a series of games in which players work in teams to counter terrorists by securing plant locations, defusing bombs and rescuing hostages. Players can earn in-game currency to buy more powerful weapons, which is a key to success. Various software cheats for the game are available online.

“Sometimes when you’re playing against players who use cheats you can tell, but sometimes it may not be evident,” said Md Shihabul Islam, a UT Dallas computer science doctoral student in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and lead author of the study, who plays Counter-Strike for fun. “It’s not fair to the other players.”

In addition to fair play, cheating also can have an economic impact when dissatisfied players leave to play other games, Islam said.

Cheating incidents also can have serious consequences in esports, a fast-growing industry with annual revenues close to $1 billion. Cheating can result in sanctions against teams and players, including disqualification, forfeiture of prize money and a ban on future participation, according to the Esports Integrity Commission based in the United Kingdom.

Detecting cheating in MMO games can be challenging because the data that goes from a player’s computer to the game server is encrypted. Previous research has relied on decrypted game logs to detect cheating after the fact. The UT Dallas researchers’ approach eliminates the need for decrypted data and instead analyzes encrypted data traffic to and from the server in real time.

“Players who cheat send traffic in a different way,” said Dr. Latifur Khan, an author of the study, professor of computer science and director of the Big Data Analytics and Management Lab at UT Dallas. “We’re trying to capture those characteristics.”

“After detection, we can give a warning and gracefully kick the player out if they continue with the cheating during a fixed time interval. Our aim is to ensure that games like Counter-Strike remain fun and fair for all players.”

— Dr. Latifur Khan, professor of computer science in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science

For the study, 20 students in the UT Dallas class Cyber Security Essentials for Practitioners downloaded Counter-Strike and three software cheats: an aimbot, which automatically targets an opponent; a speed hack, which allows the player to move faster; and a wallhack, which makes walls transparent so players can easily see their opponent. The researchers set up a server dedicated to the project so the students’ activity would not disrupt other online players.

The researchers analyzed game traffic to and from the dedicated server. Data travels in packets, or bundles, of information. The packets can be different sizes, depending on the contents. Researchers analyzed features, including the number of incoming and outgoing packets, their size, the time they were transmitted, their direction and the number of packets in a burst, which is a group of consecutive packets.

By monitoring the data traffic from the student players, researchers identified patterns that indicated cheating. They then used that information to train a machine-learning model, a form of artificial intelligence, to predict cheating based on patterns and features in the game data.

The researchers adjusted their statistical model, based on a small set of gamers, to work for larger populations. Part of the cheat-detection mechanism involves sending the data traffic to a graphics processing unit, which is a parallel server, to make the process faster and take the workload off the main server’s central processing unit.

The researchers plan to extend their work to create an approach for games that do not use a client-server architecture and to make the detection mechanism more secure. Islam said gaming companies could use the UT Dallas technique with their own data to train gaming software to detect cheating. If cheating is detected, the system could take immediate action.

“After detection,” Khan said, “we can give a warning and gracefully kick the player out if they continue with the cheating during a fixed time interval.

“Our aim is to ensure that games like Counter-Strike remain fun and fair for all players.”

Reference: “GCI: A GPU Based Transfer Learning Approach for Detecting Cheats of Computer Game” by Md Shihabul Islam, Bo Dong, Swarup Chandra, Latifur Khan and Bhavani M. Thuraisingham, 3 August 2020, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.
DOI: 10.1109/TDSC.2020.3013817

Other authors of the study include Swarup Chandra PhD’18, a research engineer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and UT Dallas computer science doctoral student Bo Dong. Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Founders Chair in Engineering and Computer Science, professor of computer science and executive director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute at UT Dallas, is senior author of the study.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, National Security Agency, IBM and Hewlett-Packard Development Co.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Rogue online gamers have designed, sold or used computer code to crush competitors playing the popular “Fortnite” survival video game, spoiling the experience and the creator’s profit potential, the game’s maker charges in a series of lawsuits.

Cary, North Carolina-based Epic Games has sued three Americans and six foreign gamers from Sweden to South Africa for hacks that undercut the game played by more than 10 million players worldwide. The lawsuits, which were filed in North Carolina and California, allege violation of the game’s copyright and terms of use contract. One of their targets may be a 14-year-old Delaware boy.

Cheating gamers are able to overpower their opponents by using tools that allow them to see through solid objects, impersonate other players and make moves other players cannot, according to one lawsuit. Up to 100 people can play the game at a time.

When cheaters “gain an unfair advantage, they ruin games for people who are playing fairly,” Epic Games spokesman Nick Chester said in an emailed statement. “We take cheating seriously, and we’ll pursue all available options to make sure our games are fun, fair, and competitive for players.”

Video Game Cheating Industry Videos

“Fortnite,” which costs nothing to play online, generates revenue by charging players for cosmetic options, like different outfits for their virtual character, which don’t give players an edge against rivals. Some video-game makers are aggressively cracking down on cheaters, who they fear could drive away eyeballs from advertising some developers sell, said Kevin Greene, who teaches entertainment law at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego.

“From the perspective of these game makers, it’s a big disruption,” Greene said.

None of the nine defendants could be reached for comment. Two U.S. residents in Louisiana and Minnesota and one Canadian did not have listed telephone numbers matching addresses where court summonses were sent. Two Russians, one Ukrainian, one Swede and one South African did not respond to emails sent to addresses listed in court documents. The Minnesota man, Charles Vraspir, is negotiating a settlement to the lawsuit, Minneapolis attorney Mick Spence said.

But in a letter to the North Carolina federal judge hearing one case, a Newark, Delaware, woman described one defendant as her 14-year-old son. Lauren Rogers said in the letter that the boy didn’t modify “Fortnite,” but instead obtained the tools from an easily accessible public web site that Epic Games should be suing instead. As a minor, the boy isn’t able to agree to the terms and conditions of using the game, she said.

“They are using a 14 year old child as a scape goat (sic) to make an example of him,” Rogers said. There was no answer at a number matching Lauren Rogers’ address.

The Epic Games spokesman did not answer when asked whether the company knew the player it sued was a minor before filing its case. The lawsuit said the boy has used fake names to keep playing “Fortnite” despite being banned more than a dozen times and posting videos on YouTube showing himself using the illicit software and displaying links to a web site distributing the cheats.

“Epic is not okay with ongoing cheating or copyright infringement from anyone at any age,” Chester said in an email. He didn’t respond when asked whether the company has also sued web hosting or other companies used to distribute the cheating code, or how those targeted were identified.

Video Game Cheating Industry Fails

A 1990s-era update to federal copyright law sets up procedures where companies can demand that online service providers like YouTube remove material that violates the companies’ rights. The person or company that posted the challenged material can counter with a statement that the material isn’t illegal. But it’s largely unknown that challenging the takedown notice can give U.S. courts jurisdiction over foreign residents in the dispute, said Xuan-Thao Nguyen, who teaches intellectual property law at Indiana University.

Greene said the video-gaming lawsuits remind him of the 1990s, when music licensing organizations aggressively enforced copyrights, even for campfire sing-alongs.

/ben-ten-ultimate-alien-games-ps2-cheats.html. “I think legally they were right but the backlash against them was enormous,” Greene said. Video-game makers “have to be careful from a public relations standpoint that, yeah, they might win the battle but they could lose the war.”

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Video Game Cheating Industry Video

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