Game Hacking Continued 2

Some more game hacking thoughts and videos. To reiterate, the motivation here is fair use, education, and understanding what protections and controls are in place in the wild today and how to interact with and manipulate these games. In general, I've been thinking about the methods of game hacking we've employed here, such as modifying memory, modifying save files, modifying map files, modifying game binaries, writing bots that automate thick clients, writing bots that automate network traffic, and even using exposed game functions or cheats. Clearly different methods are more effective depending on the situation and controls in place. I'm also somewhat surprised with the lack of anti-cheat controls I've seen deployed across the games I've been hacking, with most having little to no anti-cheat protections. The protections I have come across are either a side effect of good error correction or are overly invasive like these crazy anti-cheat mechanisms, but some games still find the right balance of good controls. The following snippet from the Blizzard Anti-Cheating EULA shows some of the technical controls they are using, which are all fairly ethical in nature, once you get past the spyware'ish nature of Warden:

(2) In an effort to combat the efforts of those individuals who are willing to violate the EULA, Blizzard utilizes an ‘anti-cheating’ utility that runs as part of Blizzard games. This ‘anti-cheating’ utility performs limited scans of:

(I) The Random Access Memory (‘RAM’) that is occupied by a Blizzard game to confirm that the Blizzard game’s program has not been altered or ‘hacked’ in violation of the EULA; 

(II) The Blizzard games ‘process’ to determine if any unauthorized third-party programs or computer code has been attached to the Blizzard games process; 

(III) The Windows Process List to determine if any confirmed hacking, botting or cheating programs are presently open in violation of the EULA; and

(IV) The Windows Handles list to see which processes have a handle to the Blizzard games ‘process’. Additional information obtained from RAM and/or disc for the processes that have a handle to the Blizzard games ‘process’ will be used to determine if it is a confirmed hacking, botting or cheating program in violation of the EULA.

That said, on to the hacks!!