Hacker: "DHW will not be cheat-free"

With just 48 hours left before the start of DreamHack Winter, discussion has been rife about whether Valve will be able to keep the event cheat-free following the bans recently handed to Simon "⁠smn⁠" Beck, Hovik "⁠KQLY⁠" Tovmassian and Gordon "⁠Sf⁠" Giry.

An anonymous German former cheat developer has now stated that Valve is not doing enough to wipe cheats out of the professional scene and that the players who were cheating before will continue to do so, including at the Swedish major.

HEADZOTS app for iOS (Photo courtesy of 99damage.de)

He also revealed some disturbing facts about the undergroung cheating community and how customisable these hacks are, explaining that, since it is "almost impossible" to detect whether a player is cheating or not, except if you have a look at their .DLL files, smn's ban was down to poor customisation.

Below you can find a snippet of the interview, conducted by 99damage.de:

Let's talk again about the conspicuity of a cheater. Could I use such a private hack as an inexperienced cheater or would I be noticed easier because I have no experience of how to hack correctly?

First you actually have to get access to the private hacks, the good cheat coders are not distributing them to just about everyone. But let’s assume you’ve got it. If you are using the hack, your shots are basically directed. You just have to be close to the model and the rest is done by the hack. But this is only the case if you have default settings or no reasonable ones. If you have decent settings, then you cannot be busted through a demo, no way. But for this you need very good know-how and aiming. In theory you can make your own individual settings for each weapon and for each shot, what should happen or by what percentage the hack should help. For example you can set up the spray control in a way that all shots hit, even at long distance. At this level it is almost impossible to detect that and prove it's a hack. The only option in this case is to read the DLL files. Smn for instance had poor settings, so it was noticeable, but even in his case no one could say 100% that he has running something in those matches.

Is the coder setting up the cheat however I ask him to, or do I have to do that on my own? Is the cheat on my hard disk then?

Every cheat coder does that differently, depending on how the cheat works. supex0's cheat runs through Steam Cloud and he set it up to download into a DLL-file automatically as soon as you login to your account. Another possibility is to simply integrate the cheat into a workshop map you want to warm up on. You have to tell him in advance what exactly you expect from the cheat, so he can regulate the settings for you. You have to be an administrator yourself in order to modify the cheat on your own, so that's usually done by the coder himself. Then again there are also people like ko1n who simply developed an app that lets you control everything. That's an exception though, since ko1n is a student and knows everything about application administration - but he is just doing it as a hobby, and is only giving the cheats to close friends. He could earn loads of money, if he wanted to, because that app is the best thing out there at the moment.

Do you think that we will now see a cheat-free DreamHack?

Everyone that has been cheating will continue doing so. supex0 has probably updated his hacks. But the hacks from the Danish coder, VALVE doesn’t even have a source code of it so it remains undetected. The only ones that have been busted were those who used supex0’s hacks. What we could do is to keep the DLL files and once the Anti-Cheat tools reached a certain point we could prove the hack. You can compare it with doping, the blood samples are stored a certain time until they are able to prove the doping with new tests. It goes the same way with undetected cheats from which you don’t know their source code.

If you had to tell us a number, how many players are cheating on a professional level?

Well, it is hard to tell unless you can check the DLL-files. If you want to hear a number from me, I’d say at least 5 in Germany and internationally about 30.

You can read the rest of the interview by clicking here.