Topic of presentation: Cheating – The malware for video games (Light Talk)

In the last decades video games have grown into a multi-billion dollar industry, creating new opportunities for attackers.

Connected features of the games and their lack of security solutions provide an ideal platform for malware developers, who managed to exploit it for financial gains.

In time, attacks and defenses have become more and more sophisticated. This escalated into an ongoing war of cheaters and anti-cheat developers, which is very similar to the one between malware authors and security companies.

In this talk I focus on the parallels of regular malware and cheating exploits, also showing the struggle of mitigating attacks in an extremely performance-sensitive environment.

I present methods attackers have used to gain money by cheating and talk about the current state of cheat and anti-cheat software.