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Hopefully this clears up some of the misinformation and/or confusion about Valve Anti-Cheat.
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Your voice fits perfectly lol. Thanks for this!
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I think you explained the Vac system perfectly! I honestly had no idea there was such a claim of false positives back then. The more you know I guess.
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Your English needs to be more broken for the people who need this video.
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Wonderful! Now when anyone complains that they were falsely banned, I will direct them to this video.
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Thanks for the video! Can't wait to Copy paste it everywhere.
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haha, i laughed pretty hard at this!
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The background music just makes that video golden.
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There was also another false positive when the ESEA Client was banning people when ran after CS was opened.
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Note that he says in VAC 2 which is the current build of VAC
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This needs to be sticky thread
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Your voice is beautiful.
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Well im confused as to whether jonnymads method of humiliating hackers is more fun than posting this video to their thread or not. :/
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This will be the polite reply of making fun of future "i got vac banned i dont cheat"
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guys, guys, fear not, because Postal is now offering free unbans for VAC !
Profile Linke :)
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There needs to be more technical information revealed before a reasonable person can conclude that false positives aren't likely.
The video mentions that people were banned because a file on the disk was different than a file in memory. This implies that VAC doesn't just use a blacklist of known cheats, and, therefore, false positives are possible.
For instance, many programs modify the memory of and inject DLL's into all running processes. These programs can include anti-viruses, accessibility programs, malware (which can be hard to account for), and others. It seems that all of these programs would have to be whitelisted, and any unknown program that does this could lead to a false positive.
In addition, faulty hardware can lead to a mismatch of data between the disk and memory. There can be corrupt sections of memory or just CPU errors due to overheating (which are likely to lead to a crash or blue screen, but some errors can have little effect besides corrupting the memory).
The video also mentions that if there was a false positive, a vast number of people would be affected. However, that would not be the case in the above scenarios.
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How about a combination of both? :o
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There's no reason to know
If anything it'll make it harder for us to identify anyone that actually hacked, and secondly Valve always lifts bans that are false positive
The only time there ever was a false positive was when 12,000 users on MW2 were VAC banned due to a dll being mismatch from install.
If only several people got banned it's not false.
The people claiming there was a "false positive" aren't for some reason getting unbanned, and that can only mean one thing.
VAC also doesn't ban for hardware mismatch and such stuff like that, it only detects modifications to .DLL and .EXE core files
What other program besides the main .exe of the game would be touching and modifying these files?
If there were false positives being handed out, it would only come from an update and that would affect everyone
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lolo, you are simply repeating what was said in the video without actually addressing any of my points. You speak as though all false positives are eventually known by Valve, yet you haven't explained how that could possibly be the case.
Like in the video, you mention that if several people get banned, then they aren't false positives. However, I have given several scenarios in which several people could falsely be banned.
You say that VAC only detects modifications to core DLL and EXE files, yet that is precisely what happens in my scenarios. They are modified in memory (or on the disk) by faulty hardware or by other programs.
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The false positives would be racking up like the national debt because of all the anti-virus, accessibility programs, malware, anti-malware, ect, that are in use by every (ok, most) Steam user every day for the last X number of years.
That dog won't hunt, man.
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If you don't want to get banned, don't cheat.
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Not really, tirpider. All the popular anti-malware and accessibility programs would be whitelisted. Most malware doesn't modify the memory of all programs, and most people don't have faulty hardware. However, some do, leading to a slow trickle of false positives.
My point is that given the information in the video, a reasonable person cannot conclude that false positives are not likely.
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I see your point.
I believe the author did a good job of giving a quick explanation without becoming bogged down with technical details. In fact, I think going over those details would best left as a private discussion between the individual and Steam technical support.
As a straightforward public announcement of exactly how VAC does it's thing would lead to folks finding a way to simulate hardware failure or security software behavior to mask their cheating efforts.
Sure, security methods are best when out in the open for folks to discuss and harden them, but this doesn't really feel like the setting for that sort of thing.
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Valve would've already changed their anti-cheat system if these were really points needed to be addressed, Valve also looks into these bans as well to see what went wrong, and they will not let someone falsely banned stay banned.
Unfortunately the "False positive" stories aren't exactly true as a lot of the accusations come from people trying to hide their Steam profiles or have registered on hack websites, especially since Garry himself addressed these bans
No-one is going to get unbanned. I can only assume that you think we willy nilly overturn VAC bans, and that if you complain you will get unbanned. Lots of people have been tweeting us along similar lines.
This is probably as a result of a thread on a AA.
Claims of innocence would be a lot more believable if you didn't post your intention to claim innocence on a cheat site moments before.
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lolo, the video says that there has only been one instance where Valve has caught their false positives (which was when there was a spike of VAC bans due to an error). Therefore, any false positives cause by my scenarios would not have been caught by Valve.
Yes, there will be plenty of people who were correctly banned claiming that they were falsely banned. This does not mean that some people do not actually get falsely banned.
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Either way, if they even were falsely banned and that VAC couldn't tell Valve why, what do you think Valve can do about it
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Nothing can be done about any previous bans in which Valve has insufficient evidence logged, but future false positives can be prevented by changing the way VAC works. Use a blacklist of known cheat programs, and manually verify any anomalies detected by heuristics (If the manpower is available--this is optional). In addition, obfuscate the client, use server-side detection of cheating, and prevent exploits from happening in the first place.
This is, of course, all hypothetical and based on the info in the video.
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The VAC system records evidence for every ban. If for some reason there is no evidence, valve will drop the ban.
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Well, I don't know how the clockwork of VAC ticks.
And I doubt anyone posting on this board does either. If they do, then I notice they aren't making any "here is exactly how VAC works" threads.
If you want answers, you will have to find a way to contact Valve/Steam/God and ask them directly.
Pretty sure that if you close your eyes and think real hard, you'll get an answer from God first, though. It will be the tiny whispering voice of your conscience saying ~don't cheat and you won't get banned~.
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I'll use that box to hold all the things I haven't been banned from.
(You might need to give me another one.)
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Let this be an example
Anti-viruses don't latch onto the game. I've never heard of a Anti-virus modifying dlls of a game as well. Most hacks use an injection or AKA forcing themselves to the game. This is how VAC detects cheats by detecting "Injections" into the code. Most hacks use an injection.
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timothy, I have personally seen DLL's of anti-viruses injected into game processes. IIRC, Zonealarm was one of them. In any case, injecting a DLL (and therefore modifying memory) is only one method among many that VAC would have to be able to detect in order to find cheating.
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Humiliate them your way first pls, its so entertaining :D
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I'm not trying to take the cheater's side or anything, but a very good friend of mine who runs a bunch of community event and http://fragworld.org/ got banned, and 1 month later unbanned silently without an explanation or even a sorry. This is a member I know 100% wouldn't cheat, he has a long history in gaming, owned a lan center, was a PB reviewer admin, etc. Knew him for a long time, he took me as a reporter to pax, etc...
I'm just saying, there ARE more false bans then you might think. Although the chances are low, if not pretty much never happening.
I could get him to talk to you about it if you really want.
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The point of the story is, your buddy did not get unbanned by making a thread here.
Hundreds of fuckstick-for-brains morons think that's how it works. That's why this video exists.
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WTF IS THIS???????? this better be a joke
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Nice find, I'll check it out!
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You're seriously implying that an overheating cpu or some shit is going to change a dll/exe while it's loaded? Really? That's even more absurd than saying that some non-cheating program is going to modify and exe/dll while the game is running...
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People have no idea how vac is working... Why don't you guys reverse it?
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Bwaaahahahahahahaa, porn-star music in the backround is just brilliant, had a good laugh at this, good on ya OP.
Jonnymad my bru, this vid should be a footer for all your detective posts, lol.
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Yes, Mon_ons. Faulty hardware will lead to corrupt memory. If that wasn't the case, there would be no need for tools like Memtest. Faulty hardware will cause the dll/exe to be loaded into memory incorrectly.
Take a look at this article (scroll down to "Your Computer is Broken"), where the devs of Guild Wars identify memory corruption in the Guild Wars process.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
x 44
x 6
x 3
x 2
x 1
Zing x 2
Informative x 3
Artistic x 2
Friendly x 1
