Key theft and hacks, is it safe?

[Skullet~Man 2]

OK so I'm new to dayz, really enjoyed the idea of it and what my friend had told me so, i went out to buy the game and have a go.

1st game of dayz and i start running around doing all the stuff you do when your new.

Running like hell at the 1st sight of a zombie, get down on my belly and travel for a good 15 mins only to see a zombie and run like hell again.

Finlay i get a gun and and kill my 1st zombie, go hold up in a shed to recover from excitement.

2 guys open the door and start telling me to come out and they will not kill me, (I'm freaking out right now) so i go out saying "plz don't kill me i have nothing"

but instead of killing me they start pumping out all this stuff for me, a chopper comes down and they tell me to get in. we fly around landing and killing stuff and I'm thinking that this is so cool until I'm told this is a hack and they can do just about anything............ the magic of the game just got a bit less.

2nd day of playing days and i have a new guy and running around loving it again for the last few hrs, got a gun and a bunch of stuff. on my way to meet my friend and go on a zombie killing run. good fun until a guy comes sprinting up to me so fast with another guy crouching on his chest like a baby harness and 1 shot kills me in the head......... 2 mins later my friend gets killed by the same guys at the other end of the map....... Magic going fast.

day 3 of owning dayz. play for hrs and get killed by bandits..... better than hackers.

day 4 of owning Dayz, all day servers saying my CD is in use........ not much magic left at all

So i have been on and off after that, key thing has not come back up again but am hearing a lot about key theft and a lot about hacking, is it worth and safe to play or will i just always get killed by hackers or get my key stolen so in the end i will be band?

Thanks for your time :)

[SqTH 260]

day 4 of owning Dayz, all day servers saying my CD is in use........ not much magic left at all

Wow rude story.

I feel like TONS of players gets their CD-key stolen without fishing and without executing a malicious program.

Srsly, no troll inside.

[sturmwaffles 38]

playing on servers with less people help with hackers a bit, I would recommend it :-)

you will be fine, hut never try to download a hack...a lot of times they will just find your key and take it, selling it to hackers.

[Banicks 55]

The official word is that you cannot have your CD key stolen by simply playing DayZ or being the victim of a hacker/scipter. The only possible way to have your CD key stolen is to download and utilise a third party program, generally speaking, these are the actual hacks/scripts themselves.

Rocket made his statement clear at the end of this thread - http://dayzmod.com/forum/index.php?/topic/89339-dont-play-day-z-today-massive-cd-stealing-while-in-game/

[OrLoK 16185]

Hello there

It's safe to play as long as you don't try to run and scripts or any downloaded "hacks", some of which steal your Key.

Just a quick note. The thing that hackers did was to use publicVariable to overwrite some functions in the mission/game. This "injected" clients who were connected with illegal commands. This made BE kick the players (if the admins were running script detection) but BE would never globally ban because of it, which makes sense. A rouge admin could made a legal operation illegal and get everyone who was on his server banned so BE doesn't do that. Scripting is something the admins has to take care of, with the help of BE ofcourse.

What BE does is to ban when people are trying to circumvent BE, like manipulating memory or similar. To combat the hacker "injection" thing, BE added a publicVariable file as well where the admins could decide what was allowed and what wasn't. For Dayz I don't think there's any legit reason to use PVs. At the same time, BE said on BIS forums that there's no way to bypass this.

And that's when we're comming to the core of things. AFAIK there's a hack that bypasses BE. I believe with the new version (1.170) they found a way to bust the bypass hack but didn't announce it. Then they datamined for a couple of days and bam! hackersbegone.

Also, there's no way hackers can steal cd-keys through dayz.

Tl;dr: scripting will never get you globally banned, being kicked for script restriction is not why you're banned, hackers running scripts on your client won't get you banned, trying to circumvent BE (which most hacks do) will get you banned, BE doesn't instaban, they ban in waves. Your cd-key is safe unless you run some 3rd party shady software.

Rgds

LoK

[Skullet~Man 2]

Could it be something from getting updates from dayz commander? i have been using it to download the updates? i have not had it again and i have had the game for about 7 days now.

So just by playing i can not get my Key stolen? This gives me hope to want to keep playing.

Edited September 10, 2012 by Skullet~Man

[puppetworx 474]

Couldn't a rogue server steal your key? Say a non-hive one?

[OrLoK 16185]

Hello there

It's not happened throughout the lifetime of A2 so I highly doubt it.

Rgds

LoK

[Thadeum 103]

Looks like this cheater is building up fake stories to get his CD Key unbanned.

[Dankine 377]

Could it be something from getting updates from dayz commander? i have been using it to download the updates? i have not had it again and i have had the game for about 7 days now.

So just by playing i can not get my Key stolen? This gives me hope to want to keep playing.

noooooooooooooooo

[venthos 605]

Couldn't a rogue server steal your key? Say a non-hive one?

No. That's the whole purpose of BattlEye GUIDs. They're one-way hashes that involve your CD Key so that they're unique to each CD Key, but not the actual CD Key. There's no way for anyone to know what your CD Key is unless they have access to your computer itself (via trojan/virus/etc.) and access your windows registry.

[Thadeum 103]

No. That's the whole purpose of BattlEye GUIDs. They're one-way hashes that involve your CD Key so that they're unique to each CD Key, but not the actual CD Key. There's no way for anyone to know what your CD Key is unless they have access to your computer itself (via trojan/virus/etc.) and access your windows registry.

Or... The GUID can be reversed engineered to provide the legit CD key.

[Skullet~Man 2]

Thadeum my CD Key is not banned.

I got the game for its realism and have no intention of cheating with hacks, i would find it hard to kill another player for that matter.

[puppetworx 474]

No. That's the whole purpose of BattlEye GUIDs. They're one-way hashes that involve your CD Key so that they're unique to each CD Key, but not the actual CD Key. There's no way for anyone to know what your CD Key is unless they have access to your computer itself (via trojan/virus/etc.) and access your windows registry.

Ah ok, thanks that makes sense.

Then according to this page (and rocket's comment) the only way two ways to receive a global ban is to try to bypass Battleye or to run software which steals your key and then have your key used by someone attempting to bypass Battleye.

[Dankine 377]

Thadeum my CD Key is not banned.

I got the game for its realism and have no intention of cheating with hacks, i would find it hard to kill another player for that matter.

You find cheating somehow the same as killing another player?

You'll get over that btw, you will kill people.

[rocket 16567]

CD key in use is different from a global ban.

What does happen sometimes, is that people buy CD-Keys in bulk (say from a website store) using stolen credit card details, and then resell them on their own store/ebay/etc.... When the card correctly gets identified as fraudulent, the keys get removed and those who bought the key find they can no longer use it.

Where did you buy a game from?

[Delta Smoke 01 765]

Yes it is safe. and no you will not get your CD key stolen. Hackers do not have access to your reg files while you are in game.Dont download anything that isnt on six updater(dunno about commander i dont use it)and you will be fine. All of the posts you are seeing about hackers getting ppl banned and such, are rumours made by the hackers to cause people to panic. All of this is a result of battleye scoring a major win of 2000 hackers banned yesterday.

[venthos 605]

Or... The GUID can be reversed engineered to provide the legit CD key.

I like how you just make a sentence up and claim it to be true. Do you even know what a hash is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain

It's intentionally one-way. You can't "reverse" a hash. Before you even bring up rainbow tables, it's laughable to suggest someone has spent the time and effort to reverse engineer the GUID algorithm and generate mass rainbow tables for them. Let alone, I wouldn't be surprised if the GUIDs utilize a salt to render anything like that useless. It's much more lucrative for these abusers to setup fake downloads and let the players just hand them fist fulls of CD keys for very little effort.

[Skullet~Man 2]

I got the game from a EB games store, had the 2 CD keys on the back of the book you get with the game.

Killing in dayz i am yet to do, i tend to stay away from people for fear of them hacking and killing me.

[vandrel 36]

I like how you just make a sentence up and claim it to be true. Do you even know what a hash is?

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Hash_chain

It's intentionally one-way. You can't "reverse" a hash. Before you even bring up rainbow tables, it's laughable to suggest someone has spent the time and effort to reverse engineer the GUID algorithm and generate mass rainbow tables for them. Let alone, I wouldn't be surprised if the GUIDs utilize a salt to render anything like that useless. It's much more lucrative for these abusers to setup fake downloads and let the players just hand them fist fulls of CD keys for very little effort.

There's a lot of places to go to for info on decrypting GUID's to HEX which in turn is a 16-32 character coded CD key. All it takes is someone with no life away from home and a few weeks and that'll be that. They don't even need the actual CD key out of the GUID, just the HEX and regedit will update the rest of the entries.

Thankfully this hasn't been done yet, that we know of, but it's not impossible. There's nothing unique about BE GUID's, they are just GUID's for a series of numbers. Algorithms are not impossible to figure out, it has been done on a lot of other games by people with a lot of time on their hands.

[exesgo@gmail.com 31]

I got the game from a EB games store, had the 2 CD keys on the back of the book you get with the game.

Killing in dayz i am yet to do, i tend to stay away from people for fear of them hacking and killing me.

Then you mush have been phished.

[venthos 605]

There's a lot of places to go to for info on decrypting GUID's to HEX which in turn is a 16-32 character coded CD key.

No one has brought up the registry entry, because of course you have the CD key if you have access to the registry. Converting something from ASCII to HEX is not "encrypting/decrypting". It's like going from base-10 to base-16 with math. That's not "encryption". I'm not sure why you even brought up the registry entry. Everyone knows/agrees that if someone gets ahold of it they have your key. The only way for that to happen is if you're stupid and download a trojan. No one is in disagreement there. The poster claimed that server admins could get your CD key just by you logging in and them seeing your GUID. That is what is in contention here.

nothing unique about BE GUID's, they are just GUID's for a series of numbers. Algorithms are not impossible to figure out, it has been done on a lot of other games by people with a lot of time on their hands.

Please re-read my post, as I've fully address this already. I'm not sure why you regurgitated it. I guess I can regurgitate my prior post again for you. If "figuring out the algorithm" was so easy, all hash algorithms would collapse within days/weeks by your claims. This would pretty much bring down the entirety of the internet within weeks if it was as easy and quick to do as you claim. The majority of the internet's functionality relies upon hashes being prohibitively time consuming to attempt to reverse the origin string... especially when salted. When I mean "prohibitively time consuming" I don't mean days/weeks, I mean centuries/thousands of years of 24/7 distributed computing time... or longer, depending on the algorithm used.

I love how people who hate BattlEye seem to understand astoundingly little about computers. I guess that's the type of folks who get phished/download trojans.

[Skullet~Man 2]

well thanks guys for all the help. I do feel safer playing knowing the only way to loose a CD key is to download things, as i do not plan on doing that the only think i have to worry about is bandits and hacks :D

[jblackrupert 308]

I got the game from a EB games store, had the 2 CD keys on the back of the book you get with the game.

Killing in dayz i am yet to do, i tend to stay away from people for fear of them hacking and killing me.

EB games sells both new and Used games.

If you buy Used games that use a key for multiplayer then you run the risk that the guy who sold it to them

wrote the key down and is using a pirate copy with that legit key to play.

Never buy MP games that use keys USED unless you know and trust the seller.

Edited September 12, 2012 by jblackrupert