Dota, which is seen as the first modern MOBA game series in the gaming world, is still played by millions of players and has the largest esports prize pool in the world, although it is overshadowed by League of Legends today.
Although Dota 2 has a much more introverted and “playing by the rules” player community compared to other games, sometimes cheaters can come out of this community. Valve, on the other hand, announced that it uses a remarkable method to detect these cheaters.
Cheaters betrayed themselves with the “Honeypot” method
In the article published on Dota’s official site, it was announced that for the last few weeks, Dota 2’s client has a vulnerability and some players are cheating with 3rd party cheat software using this vulnerability. Valve officials, who were aware of the cheats from the first day, prepared a patch for the game and enabled the players using this vulnerability to be detected by the “Honeypot” method.
The honeypot method is a trap method often used by hackers for a while. In this method, the person setting the trap sets up a digital trap around the data by openly presenting data or information that the victim cannot refuse. The victim, who is attacked in the hope of obtaining the data, reveals himself in order to gain access to this “sweeter than honey” information and is caught in the trap.
So how did Valve catch these cheaters?
According to Valve’s statement, after the cheat was noticed, the authorities, who patched this vulnerability with the “Honeypot” method, started to wait by integrating a system that would report the user’s ID to the client to Valve officials if cheats were used. Detecting a total of 40,000 cheaters in a few weeks, the authorities removed all cheaters from the game permanently with IP ban and “Hardware Ban”. He also stated that professional players who were found to be involved in this cheat were also permanently banned.
We hope that other companies will take the necessary steps to stop the cheaters that upset the players.
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