PunkBuster Hack!

[ChimChim]

I was on the CPX server tonight when a user called "plastered" started firing off cheat accusations. He did it quite a bit and got the CPX guys pretty upset. When they went to kick him (I was on their TeamSpeak for this) they found that he had 100 PunkBuster points. They couldn't do anything. He eventually admitted that he was cheating and crashed their server before he left.
I did some checking on PB hacks and there are a couple that get around it pretty well. This is something we need to keep a close eye on.





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Pancakes taste good, but their wily ways are not to be trusted!

[locknload]

pritty soon hackers are gunna take over every thing :x :mad:

[locknload]

it olny took me about 5 min to find pb hacks and bet there are more out there

[locknload]

this is from a member of another clan

Well today I only banned 2 speed hack and 1 invis people - not bad
Well anyway I was infiltrating one of these hacking rooms on irc.warez.net to try and find out if you can stop the speed hack (I admin Jolt.co.uk =SIM= Clan Server). But while I was there someone posted a link for a PUNKBUSTER HACK. They said that it fooled a server into thinking you had PB and that you were using no cheats. So in pure curiosity I downloaded it, took 1 minute to install it and connected to some obscure canadian server that requires you to have PB on your system. Well I can tell you that apart from my high ping I could play fine and I only have the PB installer (I deleted the extracted files because it crashes HL for me) on my HD.
I am NOT going to place the link for this file but I have already emailed the company who host this site with details of what is going on. Although it will probably be on every cs hack page within minutes of being uploaded (remember UltraHLE? - over 60,000 people got it in the 2 hours it was offically on the net). So now we see that Punkbuster has been defeated, wonid hacks exist allowing banned people to use a random wonid and join any server while the person with the legitimate wonid sits there wondering why he can't play HL online and then we have that ****ing aimbot...

[locknload]

there no more links for people to goto, if the really need them that bad then they can spend the five mins that i did looking for them

[Vygramul]

Hmmm... someone was being accused of being invisible a couple of nights ago. A couple of us could see him, and I had never heard of that one, but more than one person couldn't. He must have turned it off because I didn't get any more reports on it, but I'll have to pay attention to it.

[Dawg]

In general, once PB is aware of a hack, they can adjust to defeat it. I have no doubt that they will modify their code to defeat this hack. Don't panic.

Dawg

[locknload]

fromwhat i saw lats night it would be impossible from them not to know all i did was type in punkbuster hack in a serch bar and a miilion things came up so if they dont know already something big it wrong

[Pablo]

sounds like im gona get busted soon :D

[NVmySTYLE]

you need to understand punkbuster and what they can and cannot do. punkbuster will never catch the hacks written by an individual and only given to selected people. this is why clan matches need to be demo'd, if someone in a clan wrote a hack and distributed it amoungst thier members only, PB would never know it. Punkbuster is very good at catching code that is out there in the wild, once they are made aware of an exploit they quickly update punkbuster to catch the cheaters.

there is software out there that compliments punkbuster, it's called the md5 tool and can be found at punksbusted.com. it's a server side anti cheat program that scans for modified game and system files, once a cheater connects to one of the servers running this software and gets caught they are added to a global master ban list that updates all servers running the md5. the cheater is globally banned by guid and hardware from all servers running the tool, also the md5 tool takes random screenshots of everyone playing and when a person is suspected they can be reviewed and even sent to punksbusted for further review. another thing about md5 and cheaters, there is no way to uninstall a cheat once used (they modify system and game files) and md5 ferrets those people out as well. some may remember the ordeal with fm20 and us, well some of thier members installed hacks to test them, i have seen a couple of thier members added to the punksbusted master ban list as a result.

cheaters will always be out there, but if you're lame enough to have to use one what pleasure do you get from playing the game?


as far as admining goes, anyone banned from warmonger's and std's servers for cheating is banned from ours as well. trinity and mcfat (admins for thier respective servers) and i talk regularly, we compare notes and share guids of cheaters and/or griefers. take C.U Micheal for example, a known griefer on warmonger's server, he was banned there came to our server and promptly got banned here.....cooperation and having a good relationship with other servers/admins is important.

[Clown]

Man I hate hackers. I say if you can't beat someone fair and square then you shouldn't play. People get to into winning so much that they'll cheat just to do it. I myself just don't understand why people do that.

[Vygramul]

What's a Griefer?

[Dawg]

What's a Griefer?
There are various incarnations but it really comes down to a player that makes it their mission to mess up the game for other people, often a single player.

edit: MD5 is a cryptologial hash algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5). It basically reduces each file to a single 128-bit value. If the file, when reduced by the algorithm, does not match the expected 128-bit values then it is recognized as compromised. The MD5 tool uses this algorithm to test various key components of the program to ensure that they have not been manipulated. Any change to the file, even a single character, will cause the resulting hash value to vary widely from the expected value. I cannot say what files are being tested but an example would be testing the texture files to prevent players from assigning bright orange uniforms to the enemy.

Dawg