What kind of low level device intrusion is being used to cheat in video games? A lag switch? Only works when the devs are retarded enough to use P2P for multiplayer. Key injection? Macros are already available.
A custom PCIe device that spoofs an NVMe drive to inject code into the game. Did you not read the thread, like, at all?
Modern cheating methods are absurdly sophisticated, and there's a big industry making a shit ton of money from it.
The stack looks like this:
- A DMA card (typically some flavor of FGPA) in the gaming PC. This card imitates an innocuous piece of hardware (e.g. an NVME drive) and has 'Direct Memory Access' on the system. Meaning it can read any area of the gaming PC's memory at will. - These are hundreds to thousands of dollars.
- Firmware loaded onto that DMA card that is capable of finding the memory areas for the game you want to cheat in and grabbing the relevant information it needs to enable your cheats - This firmware is almost always a subscription service
- A wire (typically USB) from the back of that card to a second PC. This exports the relevant memory data that the DMA card has obtained.
- Cheat software running on a second PC - Takes the input (memory readouts) coming across from the DMA device and performs whatever actual cheating manipulations you desire. Aimbot, fire bot, wall hack, radar. All that fun stuff. It's all high-grade now too, humanizes aim in a way that's indistinguishable from genuine player inputs. Long gone are the days of naive implementations of 'it aims directly at the enemy always' that you can spot from space.
- A USB injection/mimic device. This sits between the gaming PC's mouse and keyboard and the PC itself. It's transparent, meaning it adopts the hardware id etc of the upstream mouse/keyboard. This is where cheat inputs are fed back into the gaming PC from the cheating PC.
- A fuser (optional), which takes video output from the cheating PC and can overlay it on the video output from the gaming PC. This provides any visual cheating outputs you might want (wall hacks etc) and since it's added on the cable that connects to the monitor, the gaming PC sees none of it.
Now, using this stack, you have an undetectable way to cheat at any game. You're not injecting any code. Absolutely no software is running on the gaming PC. No memory is manipulated. Data is invisibly read via DMA, and actions are invisibly inserted via hardware input devices. There is no video output on the gaming PC that shows anything untoward. It's invisible. You can't even make 'accidentally enable your cheat overlays while streaming' kind of user errors, so not only is it invisible, it's idiot proof too.
You might think this is schizo shit, but you'd be wrong. You can easily buy this kit online (if you're a massive fucking faggot), at places like
RangerDMA (
Archive). The firmware and cheat software are a little more difficult to source since their operations are more prone to being shut down and have to shuffle around a bit more. But only a tiny bit harder.
It's big business. Some of the subscription firmware operations openly provide stats on how many players are using their firmware in particular games. The numbers are not small, and the subscriptions are not cheap.
Riot's approach of actively fighting this is admirable. I wish them luck but it's probably mostly futile. Other game devs/publishers (e.g. Epic) just accept it as impossible and quietly embrace it - I could point you to many partnered streamers (e.g.
1 2 3) for Fortnite who are blatantly using DMA cheats and have been for years, and not a finger is (or will be) lifted against them.
