Should admins have more options at hand?

[kieran0saurusrex 8]

Last night, four of us ( including admin ) on his server - get killed by a teleporter and can do nothing about it. 

 

What can an admin do about hackers if they cant identify them?

 

Our fault for being in Berezino but WTF

[Zed's Dead 67]

Well the irony is.... Admins also have too much power.    If an admin is playing, gets killed, he can reset the server and get his character back.  They can also loot farm in a way but it's hard to do without breaking rules.

 

Why doesn't Bohemia just once and for all make hacking almost impossible.    Oh wait, then kids with mommies credit cards can't purchase their third or fourth copy of the game after they get banned every now and then.

[Baker. 1484]

Bis has never provided any kind of proper antihack, You are reliant on rewriting the hacks themselves into an antihack to do any real policing.

[a_ruttle 199]

as per everything arma related, the future of DayZ lies in passworded communties.

[Zombie Jesus 723]

Well the irony is.... Admins also have too much power.    If an admin is playing, gets killed, he can reset the server and get his character back.  They can also loot farm in a way but it's hard to do without breaking rules.

 

Why doesn't Bohemia just once and for all make hacking almost impossible.    Oh wait, then kids with mommies credit cards can't purchase their third or fourth copy of the game after they get banned every now and then.

Lol if you want to be a millionaire develop an anti hack program that catches everyone. If you think Bohemia is the only gaming company unable to get rid of hacking then you have not been a PC gamer for that long. I know Bohemia games are easier to hack than the average game, but almost every game suffers from cheaters. 

[trimpampano 19]

The problem with giving more admins the power is that there is a certain percentage that WILL abuse it. Some of the powers admins in the mod they had were spawning guns/vehicles not in the loot cycle, have a live updater of a players location every 15 seconds, and above all cheat all the fun and destroying a legitimate plaer with those tools. Yes the admins right now need more power, but I do not want that power given until the private hives role out.

Edited July 30, 2014 by TrimPampano

[Zed's Dead 67]

Lol if you want to be a millionaire develop an anti hack program that catches everyone. If you think Bohemia is the only gaming company unable to get rid of hacking then you have not been a PC gamer for that long. I know Bohemia games are easier to hack than the average game, but almost every game suffers from cheaters. 

I didn't say that other game companies too don't care enough about hacking since script kiddies will just purchase 2nd and 3rd copies of the game so they make more in sales.......

 

Has no one else thought of the idea that if they prevented hacking altogether, they would make less sales because these hackers are not purchasing 2nd or 3rd copies of the game?

[Baker. 1484]

 I know Bohemia games are easier to hack than the average game

This ^

[Chroma 61]

Any game is hackable, given time and effort (or in the case of the majority, "money") there is absolutely no way to prevent hackers from exploiting, the best you can do is patch (and in some cases even this isnt realistically possible) and issue global bans on known exploits.

This takes down a single wave, till somone sits down, works out a way around the patch and develops a new hack and you're back to square one where you need to re-issue another round of patches and update the detection software to ban the next wave.
Repeat ad nauseum.

This is exactly what BE, VAC and BI are doing, its all you CAN do.
After the initial code leak we saw a massive influx of hacks, now a few months on and several updates later, most of them are benign.
I've not had my weapon removed, my inventory stripped or seen anyone i couldn't kill since the latest patch.
Which shows me that at least people are on top of things.

All I've seen recently is ESP and Telefags, but at least i have a fighting chance of dropping the bastards now.
Things HAVE been improving, but its only a matter of time before the next wave is inbound, and then its back to waiting for more updates and banwaves.
Same as EVERY PC game EVER.

Back on topic:
I believe admins should be given way more power, even something as simple as being able to toggle an overlay of nameplates and being able to issue bans.
I understand that this is open to abuse, however, its a small community and if a server is abusing then it should be named and shamed, letting legit players avoid them. A strong community should be able to self govern and police itself.
 

[rybec 339]

Why not just start doing hardware bans? Problem solved.

[Zed's Dead 67]

Any game is hackable, given time and effort (or in the case of the majority, "money") there is absolutely no way to prevent hackers from exploiting, the best you can do is patch (and in some cases even this isnt realistically possible) and issue global bans on known exploits.

 

 

I refuse to believe that games have to be hackable.  

 

If all of the game is not dependent on client side, why can't hacks be eliminated with good design?  For example:  If you're going multiplayer and want to prevent packets being modified between client/server, then creating a checksum of the data you're sending via some algorithm of your own and checking this as it comes through on the other side can be effective. (You will probably end up doing this anyway for various QA purposes).

The same goes for most of your in-memory resources, creating a checksum at the beginning of a frame, and verifying it at various stages can yield in some pretty handy memory manipulation detection.

 

To me, game companies just don't want to put in enough resources to stop it, especailly DayZ that is so client side dependent so far.

[q.S Sachiel 470]

bro... people have hacked into the NSA, NASA, foreign government banks...

refuse to believe all you want, but everything is vulnerable to some form of attack.

It's just the time, resources and dedication of the attacker that determines whether something is 'safe'.

[supermarco 64]

I see a lot of people complaining about admin abuse and stuff.. But they are not all like that and if you see one, just create a blacklist online with the server name to warn other user so every body will see which server has some dumb admin.

 

With some friend we were used to host a server in the mod with the TSW anti hack tool, and even tho sometimes some of the admin wanted to abuse, we knew that wasn't fair. We got a lot of player suprised that we didn't spawn some op stuff when we die or when we wanted.

 

I just don't see the pleasure of abusing, for me an Admin abuse is the same thing as a cheater. 

 

Just begin to do a google doc list of server that are not good to go. 

For me the private hive will fix part of the problem.

[soulfirez 901]

never mind pointless agruement..

Edited July 29, 2014 by SoulFirez

[ZomboWTF 527]

Bis has never provided any kind of proper antihack, You are reliant on rewriting the hacks themselves into an antihack to do any real policing.

It is very difficult to make an anti-hack for any part of the arma engine i imagine, since arma never was intended for casual gamers that even tried to cheat, but for people seeking a simulation experience

 

To easily make this a thing, arma is moddable and can add scripts on the fly, which is impossible for other engines

this however also opens major holes in the security, doing the standalone on the arma engine was not a very good idea i think (yes i know its a modified ToH engine, but it's still originating from arma)

 

Sooner or later, to stop hacking, they need to find a way to completely re-organize the scripts system, since BE seems to not be able to get every hacker

 

Another problem is that BE global bans are issued 72 hrs after BE did find something, to counter false positives, which (and thisis a good thing) BE has very few of, despite hackers and cheat-program advertisers stating otherwise, so if a hacker is found, he has a three-day window of time to cheat like he wants to

 

And the biggest problem is stupid little kids downloading the hacks and using them, which most of the time gives the producer of the hack the CD key of the one downloading the hack, so there are these guys producing hacks, switching CD keys like crazy, which never ever get BE banned

 

at least that was also the situation in the mod

now that gamespy is down, i think there are also VAC or steamID bans issued, but i am not sure about that

[LeeVanSpliff 156]

Why doesn't Bohemia just once and for all make hacking almost impossible.    Oh wait, then kids with mommies credit cards can't purchase their third or fourth copy of the game after they get banned every now and then.

 

Same reason every other game doesn't make hacking almost impossible - its damn hard!

 

It'll be a long iterative process imo. I'd guess that they're gathering data now, and at some point the big ban-hammer will fall and we'll have relative peace till the next type of hack shows up or the hacker community loses interest.

[Chroma 61]

I refuse to believe that games have to be hackable.  

 

If all of the game is not dependent on client side, why can't hacks be eliminated with good design?  For example:  If you're going multiplayer and want to prevent packets being modified between client/server, then creating a checksum of the data you're sending via some algorithm of your own and checking this as it comes through on the other side can be effective. (You will probably end up doing this anyway for various QA purposes).

The same goes for most of your in-memory resources, creating a checksum at the beginning of a frame, and verifying it at various stages can yield in some pretty handy memory manipulation detection.

 

To me, game companies just don't want to put in enough resources to stop it, especailly DayZ that is so client side dependent so far.

Any Client-Server system is hackable!

You can implement checksums and algorithms all you like, but it can still be spoofed and more importantly it takes up cycles.

There's enough latency without having to process packets through yet another series of loops before being used, the same with memory, checking the heap or even the stack every frame is prohibitively expensive in terms of performance impact.

VAC and BE both already perform checksum compares they don't operate constantly however, because to do so would impact performance as discussed, but every so often they'll issue a challenge and compare checksums, either passing you, flagging you as questionable, or if you compare to a known hash you get banned.

I really don't see what more can be done!

Anti-hack software is a LOT like anti-virus software, it only detects KNOWN threats, and merely flags unknown for analysis.

The real scammers are the ACTUAL hackers, they develop an exploit, put it up for sale, cash in on all the plebs with more money than sense or morals, sales slow, release the exploit to BE or VAC, a ban wave occurs because the checksum tables get updated, and all those flags now match a known exploit.

Then develop another exploit and put it up for sale till those tail off, and repeat ;)

There's no combating it, nothing is unhackable, anything that runs code can be cracked, just look into PS3 firmware, they has an entire core dedicated to monitoring the system and as soon as linux got removed it was busted wide open.

Before linux was removed hackers didn't care because they could play around with the hardware, the moment they took hackers toys away they set to work on getting them back, simply to prove it could be done.