cheating in gaming is turning into hacking.... O.O

[stevenazari1]

OMG. I think I have seen the worst of cheating at the moment.

yesterday me and my friend were playing halo 3, guy my mate knows comes into the room and goes guys start the game I found out to bridge.

so in disbelieve and the hope that he is hell wrong we start the game....

I lag out.

but its not lag out. my whole internet goes down. for 1 minute I cant get back online.

I restart my router. connected and all back up

I join the room and the kid says he didnt use ICS. he says he has a script that will get your ip and flood your connection. AKA - DOS Attack. He even bragged that he can set up DDOS attacks if he wanted...... FOR A DAMN GAME!?

Now Im sorry I was ****** off with halo 2 from idiots bridging, standbying and even modding the game to hell. but its now resorted to hacking???! wtf? It brings question that soon people will be winning because they just blew up my £300 console.

the worst thing is its completely out of bungie and microsofts hands. I reported the dude (not my friend so what do I care) but I know this isnt going to be taken seriously by any company...

I just think this is just another reason why player hosts are crap compared to servers....

 

[stevenazari1]

Im just hoping that 360 games start looking at possible servers. I love my online gaming but its things like this that start turning it into a joke. its not so much a battle of skill in the game but more of a battle of hacking and tolerance out of it.

 

[stevenazari1]

What the heck is bridging anyway? And a DOS attack for that matter.

ok there are 3 different types of cheating in games:

Modding - Not an easy one to do but an expert has manipulated the game files and edited the game to work to their advantage. In halo 2 the "mod" players can give themselves infinite health, 100% shot accuracy, auto aim, and have all the players spawn in 1 place not forgetting to mention all the other crap they did.

Bridging (aka force host) - Not everyone in the worlds has a good connection, and as connections go the further you are from the host the more ms you get. distance isnt the only factor that matters here, bandwidth is. Bridgers can block certain traffic coming in to force a person on their team host, this person will usually have a crap connection but will have a firewall turned off while searching for the game. when the game is found and started, they start adding the enemies ip addresses and turn the firewall on. these players are now booted from the game.

Standby'ers - This is when a player is host and presses the "standby" button on their router, the connection is still established but data is blocked. this forces the other player to see no data as the host is not sending any or recieving any. As the setup rule is "the host is always right" what ever the host does in that time of connection timeout, actually happens, so the host can kill you for free for 30 seconds before they need to release standby. then you are back in the game but not necessarily because your console needs to re-sync to the host. this can take time but rest assured when you see the game again, you will be dead and about to spawn in a new location with your default weapon.

Secondary standby'ers - Not as bad as a host standby but annoying all the same, the standby'er presses the button on their router, blocking all information sent to the host to average users it shows the player running into walls but upon release they console sends a bulk of data to the host, the host then has to decide if this information is correct as a result the users not secondary standbying see the standby'er jumping around the map and struggle to shoot at them.

DOS Attack (Denial Of Service) - Ok now this is actually illegal to do and I cant believe people are doing this. a dos attack is a script which tells your computer to connect to an ip address. the target machine (in this case a console) will block any attempt to connect to it. the problem being if the requests to connect come fast enough the target machine becomes overwhelmed and cannot cope with the connection requests forcing it to shut down. if you are behind a router your computer will be safe. I have never heard of a dos attack on a direct computer though let alone a console!

DDOS Attack (Distributed Denial Of Service) - thanks to the high speeds we have today, a simple dos attack can be fended off by todays machines. so hackers have built DDOS. Think of this simply as a DOS attack but now the user can easily have 1000 machines sending requests at the same time. Your firewall is not going to cope what ever you have. DDOS works by the hacker gaining an "army" this is many machines that hold this program which will likely be a trojan. the trojan contains the script to dos attack a target when the hacker sends the signal. these victim machines are known as "zombies" and the owner unless proper antivirus is installed probably will not know if they are infected or not. the hacker will press 1 button which sends a command to a list of gathered zombies to attack the submitted ip. the hacker can just sit back and wait for the machine to go down.

The trouble with a dos attack and ddos attack is that it can seriously damage your hardware. not only that but plain fact is illegal. and to perform an illegal action over a game is simply moronic.

hope that has helped you know although wikipedia would have done the same

sunlistix, I know you can bridge on halo 3 but its not 100% not only that but it never takes your router out of commision.

 

[stevenazari1]

I agree - I read a post by a bungie staff member (was their network analyst) that having servers deals with costs etc.

But I would be happy to pay £3 a month for that. look at the rts games etc. halo is moderated by the xbox live team. but everything they do is ALWAYS reactive and not proactive.

besides - no console has the protection against a dos/ddos attack. its manipulating your connection without the need to access your console which is different to a standby/bridge etc. with those your connection isnt turned off.