Hack prevention

[mintsz]

A common way for a hack (other than trainers) is replacing a file within the designated folder. DLL Files are very common in this matter, as stated in an earlier post, I believe. To beat the hackers at their own game, they will usually place the DLL file in prior to loading the game - which brings me to an idea.

Certain servers may run anti-cheat devices, which will look over each file and determine if it is the correct one. If they are paranoid about it, they can also make it overwrite each of the files back to the original. Of course, this can be used in a POSITIVE and NEGATIVE way. To overcome this, I believe you should build it in to MTA itself, other than having a background program running and only booting hackers when the host is around.

Poll-kicking is also a good way to eliminate hackers. By using this, you could get many SA-MP players to play on MTA. Of course, if they hear about the fantastic things you guys have been doing, they'll head their right away, unless SA-MP comes up with some devious plan to make everything work top notch

My next suggestion is possibly a 'silent bot' that sits in the servers and overlooks the files the user is running, perhaps even if they are using strange codes, such as alt+1 alt+2, all that crap, like trainers use.

I hope you take something into consideration - not necessarily put it into action but perhaps consider it. These actually just popped into my head as I was typing, due to my being bored

Good luck. I look forward to MTA:Deathmatch. Especially the custom-made maps

[Twig]

Poll kicking can already be done, even in 0.5 with scripts.

The 'silent-bot', why silent i don't know, doubtful that would happen, monitoring all those key presses would just add to or cause too much traffic.

As for checking files even 0.5 did that, in DM i'm sure there will be more checks.

[eAi]

In my experience vote kicking isn't that effective as:

- Its impossible to find a percentage of votes required that makes everyone happy. You don't want to end up running a server where all the good players get kicked - not a way to get popular. At the same time its frustrating if you need just one more player to kick someone you know is cheating. I've never seen a system that works reliably. This is the same issue we had with our 1.0 vote map command.

- People who are kicked can just rejoin and hence disrupt the game even more as everyone continuously has to vote to keep them off the server.

Vote bans are even more risky.

If servers wish to experiment themselves, they're welcome to. If someone comes up with a fair system we might implement it in a future release.

We aim to try to catch hacks at the point they affect the game, not at the point of input. As such, we tend to avoid catching specific hack methods such as watching keys or scanning people's PCs as these are somewhat invasive.

[mintsz]

Twig, what I meant by silent bot was it wouldnt be talking to you unless, say, an admin made it speak or it was banning you or something. this silent bot could be reported to and enoguh reports will overlook the user, checking modified files... etc..

[Jumba']

Actually, one of the best ways to stop hackers is to get the hacks, and then disallow tose dll's to start when MTA is started, would stop lots of hackers.

that is, if that's even possible.

[Shib]

The programmers can then just simply change the name of the DLL's etc.

[mintsz]

if you ask me, changing name of dlls will NOT help, because you can easily rename the DLL of the hack. Don't bother mentioning randomization becuase you will most likely end up with an error in the line of, "you are running a different version than the host". This is why the game should simply start up, redownload the files that are able to be used as hacks, which OVERWRITES the hack. Simple as that.

EDIT: Jumba, most hacks such as dll's are simply over-writing official files of the mod or game which will do specific things - so that wont work

[Guest]

[Guest]

Ксеноновые фар и парктроников. Оптом и в розницу, доставка и работа с регионами. Xenon and Parktronikcs

[CoZ]

if you ask me, changing name of dlls will NOT help, because you can easily rename the DLL of the hack. Don't bother mentioning randomization becuase you will most likely end up with an error in the line of, "you are running a different version than the host". This is why the game should simply start up, redownload the files that are able to be used as hacks, which OVERWRITES the hack. Simple as that.

EDIT: Jumba, most hacks such as dll's are simply over-writing official files of the mod or game which will do specific things - so that wont work

good idea .. but a simple write protect flag on the file will destroy the idea

(or a small program that waits till mta is done rewriting and .. overwrite the rewrite)

checking a file checksum, and some random bits of the file if its still same should work in a lot of scenarios

[lil Toady]

There could be something like crc check of files mta uses. And maybe some in-game checks like.. speedcheck for cars, check of how high u jumped and so on..

Offtopic

Ксеноновые фар и парктроников. Оптом и в розницу, доставка и работа с регионами. Xenon and Parktronikcs

lol

[mintsz]

I remember playing Diablo 2 a long time ago and i couldn't connect to battle.net becuase I had an incorrect version (Cracked .EXE) you could do something like this but i found a simple solution of taking the original and renaming it to connect. I didnt have to rename it back to the crack after connecting however. I don't know if you can do that. I dontsee why people hack in mta... can't even race, cmon.