Valve Anti-Cheat

This list is not complete or quite vague as Valve rarely discusses the Software. The software will "Challenge" the user's machine and if the appropriate response is not received, it is flagged as a possible violation. Signature Scanning to detect possible cheats when scanning the computer's memory and processes. Any detected anomalies result in an incident report being created and compared to a database of banned application and/or analyzed by Valve engineers. Cheat users will not be notified for days/weeks about being banned, and no information is given to the user to assist in troubleshooting. Players may face additional restrictions: VAC Banned games cannot be accessed by Steam Family Sharing. GoldSource (GoldSrc): If a player is banned in one of these games, they are banned from all of them. Source Engine : If a player is banned in one of these games, they are banned from all of them. Some games have a stricter policy of having all servers VAC protected, and additionally bans players for editing of any game files except config files. Some games face digital goods restrictions and or revocation, e.g. Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive . There are three versions of VAC anti-cheat along with two A.I based anti-cheating solutions that work alongside VAC. One anti-cheat has yet to be fully realized and is in development (VAC-Live for Counter-Strike 2). Valve started working on a "long term cheater solution" in 2001 after PunkBuster stopped supporting Half-Life mods. VAC1 was initially released alongside Counter-Strike in 2002 and was considered to be in "Beta" wherein which the ban lengths were extremely short (24h) bans and most bans were revoked before that timer ended due to fear of potential false positives. Overtime the systems ban time was raised but never ended up as permanent. VAC2 was announced in February of 2005 and Valve silently pushed it to the Steam Client as its a simple module that installs onto your computer. During this time the banning system was disabled and simply sent a flag to webserver they had setup which they later announced had caught over 10,000 cheaters. Although VAC2 was a new cheating solution it is fairly trivial to bypass as it only contains a size based integrity check and nothing more. VAC3 was silently pushed to many VAC supported games sometime during or before 2010. VAC3 is usually what people think of when they think of VAC bans as it is the main version of VAC. VAC3 is streamed directly through Steam Service into the supported game on demand and retrieves info on currently or previously active DLLs in the game that is used on and checks there info using a blacklist (this part is done server-side). It contains many integrity checks however integrity checks only affect your Trust-Factor, as such, using VAC bypasses is a very useful tool on games like Team Fortress 2 that don't support Trust-Factor systems. Total time on games on the account Particular game time (CS for example) Time of day the player was logged playing Match history data for an account (K/D, assists, exc) Frequency & Number of reports Overwatch acquittals for a player Previous cheating convictions for an account, hardware ID, IP Address, email, or biometric data Machine learning model that detects if an account is using cheats server-side Number of user accounts associated with a single player (which may be deduced from a common address, phone number, payment instrument, etc. Tied to multiple user accounts) Age of the account Amount of money spent on the account or game Dollar amount per transition Granted all of these may not be actively use however these are what is listed inside the patent for Trust-Factor. VAC-Net is another A.I learning model based on the results of Overwatch, Trust-Factor, and VAC3. Is is fed data about your movement, aim, interactions, exc. It is unclear if VAC-Net is active at its full capacity and Valve has mentioned potentially collecting large cheater lists with potenti