Valve Anti-Cheat system does make mistakes?

Comments

9 responses to “Valve Anti-Cheat system does make mistakes?”

1. 

   mz.

   December 8, 2009

   Just to keep this quite general – I was researching certain aspects of VAC and speaking to “Gabe”[1] who is the head of development with games such as “Half life 1 + 2 and episodes” “portal” “garrys mod” and “Counter Strike beta through to Counter Strike: Source”

   I have played with steam for roughly 6-8 years now, and also whilst VAC was still in beta.

   The notice : “ban(s) on record” is just a link to see if you do have bans on record.

   This does not mean you are vac banned.

   To check your authenticated vac status you must goto:
   File > settings > Account

   Below this will state your Account name, Contact email address and your VAC status.

   For example:
   http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/5521/vacstatus.jpg

   This is my account info page within steam (Yes i have a steam client skin).

   Your “empty” account is not vac banned.
   VAC would not connect to your account at all unless you played a game on a VAC secured server.

   The writing on your profile page “ban(s) on record” would have (#) <— with the number of bans you have if you where vac banned.

   Reply
2. 

   Sinonim

   July 3, 2009

   It couldn’t be a free weekend account because in that period of time there was no free weekends with VAC enabled games.

   This accounte Member since: April 30, 2009

   Now let’s go to valve’s news archieve and what do we have here:

   L4D Freaky Free Friday Coming on Steam
   April 29, 2009, 4:25 pm – Valve – General Announcement.

   Reply
3. 

   GottZ

   July 3, 2009

   there is also another possible way to get banned.

   just by using the complimentary ATI offer to get half-life 2 deathmatch for free.

   its just easy to exploit that so that you can use it as often as you want with one machine.

   that also counts to the nvidia complimentary offer but the ati offer get removed as soon as you use a nvidia card

   Reply
4. 

   stranded

   July 2, 2009

   Spaqin what you just said proves that VAC is NOT automated, how can they ban a phisher with a VAC ban if he has no games? They can disable his account sure but why VAC banning him if he has no games?

   Reply
5. 

   Spaqin

   July 2, 2009

   When someone steals/tries to steal someone’s else account (sending messages like ‘VAC: Give me your login and password or you’ll be VAC banned’ to people) and he gets reported, he can get VAC banned afaik; I saw some people who didn’t had any game, but had steam logo on avatar and name “VALV’e” or “St3am support” and VAC ban.

   Reply
6. 

   pwilli

   July 2, 2009

   “No one really knows how Valve Anti-Cheat system works.”

   This is not true. It is no secret how VAC works. VAC scans your game folders (and maybe other game relevant files like graphic card drivers) for files/modifications that are known to be hacks/cheats. This means, only if there is a 100% match, it results in a VAC ban. VAC doesn’t use heuristics (like Antivirus software) and therefore can’t produce false-positives. If Valve doesn’t know of a hack/cheat, VAC won’t find it.

   The only thing not known is what hacks/cheats are currently recognized by VAC, and this is – for obvious reasons – a secret to be kept.

   The vac-banned user could also have done the following (although the guest pass idea is probably the correct one):

   1) Trick VAC into thinking that he connected to a VAC-secured server
   2) VAC scanned his files for hacks/cheats and found some
   3) VAC reported – user got banned later

   Would be a nice way to test if a hack/cheat is recognized by VAC without losing money for games (he seems to even have some “friends” of the same kind – maybe tested many different hacks?).

   Reply
7. 

   Pyro Gourmand

   July 2, 2009

   “because I couldn’t do anything about it.”

   You can do something, but it’s a long way to the top if you wanna un-ban your account :(
   (letters, emails, proof of purchase, irl or virtual receipt, etc). But it worked few times, after months of work… :/

   —

   About the empty account being banned, you can easily hack Steam to play games without buying them (like most cybercafe do in my country), and I do believe hackers can spoof SteamID.

   Or maybe it’s just an hacker playing with the VAC Ban detection system, it’s cheat-developers job after all, nope ?

   => Why a player creating a new Steam account (no particular reason of creating a new one if he already has one) would be displaying the “Vac Ban fail” so much ? He’s supposed to be a Steam newbie…

   —

   Post Scriptum : ha ha more fake-fail : his 2 “friends” have their VAC status “ban(s) on record”, that’s a freaking coincidence ! :D

   (yea stereotype and stuff, but still the 2 guys seem to be from russian-eastern europe, and these regions have some good hackers and a good script-kiddies army :D)

   Reply
8. 

   Armada

   July 1, 2009

   I think he got that account banned on purpose.

   Reply
9. 

   NateLogan

   July 1, 2009

   Yeah, Steam VAC is my personal nightmare number one. What if it bans my account from no reason? Or what if I patch some game which is not patched on Steam (pretty common) and VAC declares this as a cheating? Or something like that. Well, since I have almost 100 hundred games (92 I think), I would be very, very angry, because I couldn’t do anything about it.

   Reply

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