A new whitepaper published August 24th to Trend Micro explains how the perfectly legitimate driver mhyprot2.sys was used, absent any other parts of Genshin Impact, to gain root access to a system.
I think maybe you should re-evaluate your definition of “perfectly legitimate”.
Let’s punch a huge hole in the OS and go from there.
That sounds perfectly reasonable.
I could maybe somehow understand it, if it would bring you absolute safety from cheaters, the funniest part about this is, the cheat devs are still above them, so just throw in the towel of trying to destroy the safety of legitimate players devices if you are still losing anyway.
Just like the Mafioso “perfectly legitimate businessmen” who offer fire insurance and personal injury insurance door to door, after dark. Be a real shame if something were to happen.
I can understand that bugs happen. It’s absolutely possible for well intentioned software to have a fatal flaw that leads to catastrophic security breaches.
But there’s no scenario where a game having that access is defensible. It’s gross overreach that can’t possibly be in good faith and you deserve all the hate you get if anything bad happens.
The way people who cheat talk about input modifier devices leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I can understand why a driver level system was considered.
Cheaters in online games really are the worst type of people because they feel entitled to ruin other peoples games. It’s one thing to “level up” your solo experience. It’s a different thing to intend to ruin someone else’s.
Even if we pretended it was possible for their anticheat to work (it isn’t), it’s pure unredeemable evil to think it’s possible for there to be a scenario you’re entitled to that access.
If 50 percent of players were cheaters without that access and literally no one ever cheated again with it, you would be a monster to consider using it. It should be a criminal offense with mandatory jail time to the CEO and board of directors for every single computer it’s installed on.
Except it is. Valorant is a competitive shooter that rarely gets plagued by cheaters. Unlike Counter Strike, were cheats were even used during actual professional matches, Valorant is mostly free of cheating scandals. Every once in a while a new cheat manages to work for a week before being entirely bust. Valorant uses extremely deep anticheat that could even access higher privileges than TrustedInstaller on Windows.
Counter Strike uses Valve’s regular old VAC that lives below administrator priveleges, and it’s got cheats.
Escape from Tarkov uses regular anticheat software and is so plagued by cheating issues that the community imploded a few months ago when a YouTuber showed just how many cheaters are there per match.
So yes, aggressive anticheats can work and do work. You can be opposed to them, that’s totally fair, but you can’t make up random claims like “they can’t work”.
If you don’t have people cheating with your malware installed (which you don’t actually have evidence for), the literal only possible explanation of that is that no one cares enough to cheat properly.
Using a video camera pointed at the screen to control a mouse and keyboard that are exactly identical in every way to a real mouse and keyboard is not hard to do and no level of rootkit can ever under any circumstance detect it. It’s unconditionally impossible for their malware to detect any mildly sophisticated cheater.
Malware labeled “anticheat software” that wants obscene access to low level OS information and is a massive security liability.
The driver-level anti-cheat that was used by Genshin Impact and then later on ransomware should always be brought up on the topic of anti-cheat.
I think maybe you should re-evaluate your definition of “perfectly legitimate”.
Let’s punch a huge hole in the OS and go from there. That sounds perfectly reasonable.
I could maybe somehow understand it, if it would bring you absolute safety from cheaters, the funniest part about this is, the cheat devs are still above them, so just throw in the towel of trying to destroy the safety of legitimate players devices if you are still losing anyway.
Just like the
Mafioso“perfectly legitimate businessmen” who offer fire insurance and personal injury insurance door to door, after dark. Be a real shame if something were to happen.I can understand that bugs happen. It’s absolutely possible for well intentioned software to have a fatal flaw that leads to catastrophic security breaches.
But there’s no scenario where a game having that access is defensible. It’s gross overreach that can’t possibly be in good faith and you deserve all the hate you get if anything bad happens.
The way people who cheat talk about input modifier devices leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I can understand why a driver level system was considered.
Cheaters in online games really are the worst type of people because they feel entitled to ruin other peoples games. It’s one thing to “level up” your solo experience. It’s a different thing to intend to ruin someone else’s.
Even if we pretended it was possible for their anticheat to work (it isn’t), it’s pure unredeemable evil to think it’s possible for there to be a scenario you’re entitled to that access.
If 50 percent of players were cheaters without that access and literally no one ever cheated again with it, you would be a monster to consider using it. It should be a criminal offense with mandatory jail time to the CEO and board of directors for every single computer it’s installed on.
Reminds me of Sony’s Rootkit. Except now it’s normal.
Except it is. Valorant is a competitive shooter that rarely gets plagued by cheaters. Unlike Counter Strike, were cheats were even used during actual professional matches, Valorant is mostly free of cheating scandals. Every once in a while a new cheat manages to work for a week before being entirely bust. Valorant uses extremely deep anticheat that could even access higher privileges than TrustedInstaller on Windows.
Counter Strike uses Valve’s regular old VAC that lives below administrator priveleges, and it’s got cheats.
Escape from Tarkov uses regular anticheat software and is so plagued by cheating issues that the community imploded a few months ago when a YouTuber showed just how many cheaters are there per match.
So yes, aggressive anticheats can work and do work. You can be opposed to them, that’s totally fair, but you can’t make up random claims like “they can’t work”.
If you don’t have people cheating with your malware installed (which you don’t actually have evidence for), the literal only possible explanation of that is that no one cares enough to cheat properly.
Using a video camera pointed at the screen to control a mouse and keyboard that are exactly identical in every way to a real mouse and keyboard is not hard to do and no level of rootkit can ever under any circumstance detect it. It’s unconditionally impossible for their malware to detect any mildly sophisticated cheater.