TY - CHAP
T1 - Detecting Video-Game Injectors Exchanged in Game Cheating Communities
AU - Karkallis, Panicos
AU - Blasco, Jorge
AU - Suarez-Tangil, Guillermo
AU - Pastrana, Sergio
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgement. This work is partially supported by the Spanish grants ODIO (PID2019-111429RB-C21, PID2019-111429RB), the Region of Madrid grant CYNAMON-CM (P2018/TCS-4566), co-financed by European Structural Funds ESF and FEDER, and Excellence Program EPUC3M17, and the “Ramon y Cajal” Fellowship RYC-2020-029401.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Video game cheats destroy the online play experience of users and result in financial losses for game developers. Similar to hacking communities, cheat developers often organize themselves around forums where they share game cheats and know-how. In this paper, we perform a large-scale measurement of two online forums, MPGH and UnknownCheats, devoted to video game cheating that are nowadays very active and altogether have more than 7 million posts. Video game cheats often require an auxiliary tool to access the victim process, i.e., an injector. This is a type of program that manipulates the game program memory, and it is a key piece for evading cheat detection on the client side. We leverage the output of our measurement study to build a machine learning classifier that identifies injectors based on their behavioural traits. Our system will help game developers and the anti-cheat industry to identify attack vectors more quickly and will reduce the barriers to study this topic within the academic community.
AB - Video game cheats destroy the online play experience of users and result in financial losses for game developers. Similar to hacking communities, cheat developers often organize themselves around forums where they share game cheats and know-how. In this paper, we perform a large-scale measurement of two online forums, MPGH and UnknownCheats, devoted to video game cheating that are nowadays very active and altogether have more than 7 million posts. Video game cheats often require an auxiliary tool to access the victim process, i.e., an injector. This is a type of program that manipulates the game program memory, and it is a key piece for evading cheat detection on the client side. We leverage the output of our measurement study to build a machine learning classifier that identifies injectors based on their behavioural traits. Our system will help game developers and the anti-cheat industry to identify attack vectors more quickly and will reduce the barriers to study this topic within the academic community.
KW - Game cheating & hacks
KW - Injectors
KW - Underground forums
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85116868199&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-88418-5_15
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-88418-5_15
M3 - Conference paper
AN - SCOPUS:85116868199
SN - 9783030884178
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 305
EP - 324
BT - Computer Security – ESORICS 2021 - 26th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, Proceedings
A2 - Bertino, Elisa
A2 - Shulman, Haya
A2 - Waidner, Michael
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
T2 - 26th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS 2021
Y2 - 4 October 2021 through 8 October 2021
ER -