Playing by Unwritten Rules: Investigating the Worlds of Video Game Cheats and Online Game Hacking Communities

This PhD thesis presents an extensive exploration of the world of video game cheating, encompassing both the social dynamics of cheat-sharing communities and the technical aspects of cheat development and detection. The study begins by investigating two major online forums, MPGH and UnknownCheats, which serve as hubs for cheat developers and users, housing over 7 million posts. It examines how these communities facilitate the sharing of cheats and expertise, significantly impacting the online gaming experience and causing financial losses to game developers. The thesis identifies injectors, essential tools that manipulate game program memory to evade client-side cheat detection, as a focal point. Utilising data from these forums, an ML classifier is developed to identify injectors by their behavioural traits, offering a valuable tool for game developers and the anti-cheat industry to quickly pinpoint attack vectors.
Furthermore, the research introduces a novel type of game cheat called Virtual Machine Introspection Cheats (VIC). VIC leverages virtual machines and introspection-enabled hypervisors to subtly execute game cheats, effectively lowering the barrier against both legacy and modern anti-cheat systems. The practicality and stealthiness of VIC are demonstrated through experiments with popular games such as Fortnite, BlackSquad, and Team Fortress 2, which incorporate various anti-cheat mechanisms. The thesis showcases the implementation of sophisticated cheats like cheat radars, wall-hacks, and trigger-bots using VIC. Additionally, it assesses the performance impact of VIC on game play, particularly focusing on frames per second (fps) metrics during cheat activation. The findings reveal that these cheats remain undetected by current leading anti-cheat systems, signalling a shift towards a new cheating paradigm that could exploit cloud infrastructure for offering cheating-as-a-service. This comprehensive study not only advances the understanding of video game cheats and hacking communities but also propels forward the discourse on combating these challenges in the digital gaming domain.