How Riot Sports Video Game is fighting war against hackers

As long as video games are there, people are ready to find ways to cheat. Hobby has long dedicated himself to find weaknesses in sports, often with the goal of developing cheating that they can share or sell. But ever since online competitive gaming has become a legitimate profession, hobby-hacking has turned into an entire industry that aims to sell an unfair advantage to those wishing to pay.

Developing and selling video games Can be an attractive businessAnd video game developers have had to beef in recent years, to ban the mission theater, neutralizing the software used by them, as well as to go after cheat developers. More companies Are taking Somewhat controversial The move to deploy the anti-pattern system running at the kernel level, which means they have the highest privilege in the operating system and can possibly monitor everything that occurs on the machine on the machine.

One of the most prominent kernel-level anti-chit system is HarevalaRiot developed by sports, which makes popular Title Such as multiplayer online Battle Arena Game League of Legends and Online first-person shooter Dramatic,

Essentially, the pawn “cheats on the force to be visible,” Philip Kosinus said, the director and the chief of the opponent in the riot Describes she herself As “an anti-chest artisan”, which was placed on this earth for a unique purpose of banning the theater from online video games. ”

Thanks to the pawn and anti-chest team led by Koskinus, the riot bans thousands of theaters Dramatic According to a chart shared with techcrunch, every day.

Riot efforts are working. At the beginning of 2025, the percentage of Dramatic “Rank” game – which means competitive matches – which have theaters now less than 1% globally, The company says,

In an interview with Techcrunch, Koskinus expanded various strategies that anti-chit team in riot is used to fight theaters and deception divleters: taking advantage of security facilities in Windows operating systems, to prevent the hardware of fingerprinting chants, to stop the cheat communities, to prevent the coupled communities.

‘We can make them just like fools’

The efforts of Koskinus and his team have the deepest level of access to a gamer’s computer from the pawn. To weed theaters, the pawn takes advantage of some safety characteristics already manufactured in windows.

First, Koskinus explained, anti-chit software “almost universally” implements the most important security features of some Windows, such as, such as Reliable platform moduleA hardware-based security component, and Safe bootThese two technologies check if a computer has been revised or tampered with, such as malware or cheating, and prevents it from booting if so. Again, the pawn checks that all the computer’s hardware driver, who allow the operating system to communicate with the hardware, is updated to identify additional hardware that may be able to cheat. Finally, the pawn prevents the code from loading and executing the code in the memory of the kernel.

“Originally, all safety features that Microsoft and Hardware Manufacturers have taken advantage of the safety of the operating system, we use or apply,” Koskinus explained Techcrunch. “We have a playground where we can play. We have to implement a certain level of security.”

But fighting theaters is not just about technology; This is about understanding theaters themselves and how they work.

The team of Koskinus has a “reconnaissance arm”, he said, the primary responsibility of which is to achieve and catalog, which includes sometimes cheating. The team cheats in the part using Sock Puppet Identification, in which cheater and developer communities have been cheated for years, for undercover operations.

“We have even gone to give anti-chest information to establish even credibility. We will come out in such a way that it was something that we were (reverse engineers), and explain how an anti-chit technology works to display it that we know the stuff,” Koskinus said. “And then in development take advantage of our path in something, and then sit until it is launched, allowing it to get users and then ban all.”

Some frauds try to remain uncontrolled by selling only a few customers, essentially marketing their product as a high-end, or cheating “premium”, as Koskins call them. Koskinus stated that these premium cheats can spend thousands of dollars, and only a handful of customers are sold.

Cheat makers use this strategy to reduce the risk of selling a riot undercover employee, but also for customers who will be more careful about staining cheating and cheating.

These developers are essentially selling “reputation to be outspoken”, Koskinus said. He said that one of The “strongest weapons” of The Re-Reet’s anti-chest team, he said, for example, the publicly cheated to ban all his players, defaming the dealers, or Leak screenshot Showing that they are inside their discord channels.

“We can just make them like fools,” he said.

Koskinus and his team also have to be careful that they do not come very difficult. By cheating a little, within the reason, the riot can slow the gamers to slow down. “If we kill every player every time, they simply cheat until they find one,” he said.

He said, “To cheat dumb, we impose slow restrictions.”

To prevent repeating criminals, the pawn can “fingerprint” the hardware that uses a cheater – effectively identifying your device uniquely – to get a new cheating and continue cheating for that player to make it difficult.
In a more psychological strategy, Koskinas and his colleagues also publicly trolled theaters call themAmong other things, “a brainless pathogen,” who has an inability to get good in this video game “.

Cheater toolbox

Thanks to all these techniques and strategies, most theaters can now be roughly divided into two categories. First, representing most theaters, is designed by those who are easy to find out by using cheap equipment that are easy to find out. According to Koskinus, the riot staff sarcastically call these cheating as “Download-e-Ben”.

“A lot of theater, if you think about it, they are young,” he said. “Many of them have not grown up yet. The way they connect with sports are cheating, and a lot of that behavior is like the power you feel when you do it.”

“They are going to come back, they are going to be banned, and they are just going to do every weekend for the next two to three years … and then, finally, they will collide with puberty, and it is hoping that,” Koskinus said, smiling.

The second category includes something that uses premium fraud which are difficult to detect. These devices are known as “external” cheating, describing coskins, as they depend on using real hardware, not only software.

A type of external cheating depends on a direct memory access (DMA) attack. DMA Cheats need to use special hardware to players-think about high speed PCI Express Card – That everyone’s exfiltrates DramaticMemory for a separate computer that can investigate the game on dedicated hardware, outside the scope of the pawn.

By doing this, separate computers of the cheater can be used to identify other players; Walls, ammunition and weapons such as in-game objects; And identify properly where the players and items are in the map. It can also include items that do not appear to gamers. Then, using the firmware installed on the card, the deception makes a radar on a second screen that they can see rival players – even if they are hidden – to get an undue advantage.

According to Koskinus, a more advanced version of this type of cheating depends on HDMI fusers, which is read by separate computers on the main screen of the cheater. In this way, the cheater does not have to look between the computer display, to see where their opponents are, they allow them to focus on the performance that they are playing with the game.

These techniques allow the fraudsters to be viewed through the walls – known as “Vaulhax” – and referred to as grant”extrasensory perception“Essentially superpower within the game.

“I think we find out most today, but it is a repetition in a way,” Koskinus said.

Then the screen reader cheats, where the HDMI output of the computer is sent to a second computer that what is on the game display, such as the head of a rival player. The second computer then sends an instruction to an Arduino mini-computer to control robotics, for example, which is connected to the mouse of the cheater and automatically targets other players-a type of deception that is known as “a”, which is “a type of cheating”Aimbot“As Koskinus said,” The mouse is originally governed by a machine, for all intentions and purposes. “

If the deception performs well, it can be difficult to find out, but Koskinus said, in the long run, the cheater “does not look like a human player” because they are so accurate and shooting on their rivals.

Koskinus said, “You have to do to an extent (cheat), where a person can do, you have to take advantage of it.” “And once when you are there, you are not really cheated enough for most users to make it worth.”

Nevertheless, this technique is popular, Koskinus accepted. The negative side is that it requires a potentially expensive second PC with a fast graphics processor, which quickly classifies what is happening on the screen and quickly to send the instructions back.

Future of cheating

Koskinus says that he often worries about the use of AI for screen classification, to find out what human inputs look, and how to reproduce them.

“This is already here,” he said. “Especially in Dramatic With those bright outlines, you can do it with almost an algorithm (…), you can really say wisely whether the percentage of this box is sufficient purple, press the fire key. , For reference, variants have characters Specific and vivid color schemes,

Despite safety and privacy risks associated with kernel-tier access anti-chest technology, the riot has no plans to move away from its outlook for their anti-chest engine, at least for bravery. Otherwise, according to Koskinus, using kernels will be very easy for theaters.

In general, Koskinus is trying to be more transparent about anti-church efforts including rioting publications many Blog Posts How the company goes after theaters, as well as talks to journalists. He said that this is the idea, because the riot “is the most aggressive anti-chit by asking people to run a service all the time,” players are worth knowing how the company is using that privilege.

“The best thing that I think we can ask for access to that level and being around such, is as transparent as we can,” Koskinus said.

“We are not telling you what is under the hood, but we will tell you almost something else,” he said.