There is a human being behind every attack, and today cyber crimes are getting bolder and more astute day-by-day. According to the 2021 Global Threat Report ecrime attacks made up to 79 per cent of all intrusions (via hands-on-keyboard activity) which has been uncovered by CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch. Today’s rapidly changing remote work environment highlights that identity protection is central to the defense of any enteprise’s infrastructure. Also, since lockdown, the gaming servers of various popular games have been compromised followed by in game cheats. Since lockdown as most of the on ground tournaments went online, the DAU and MAU rates of the competitive games are skyrocketing, and because of that many players are trying to hack the servers or using aimbots and other cheats. And it’s the truth that cheats completely ruin the competitive integrity in online video games.
Not a while ago, big-name players like NICKMERCS and Vikkstar have stopped playing in tournaments and even quit playing the Call of Duty: Warzone game entirely as cheaters went bonkers in the game.
Ruining the game with cheats impacts players and the game’s developers alike. And cheats compromise the security of their users and everybody else in the game. Historically, this took the form of DDoS and similar attacks. Today’s cheats bring the risk of privacy breaches and malware into massively multiplayer online games (MMOs ). Voicing cheats like these Surfshark has rolled out a report – Hacking Wins, which shared that Fortnite topped the chart and it has more than 26 million youtube views on the top video related to cheating in the game. Here are the key findings:
· The most-cheated online game is Fortnite, with 26,822,000 YouTube hits for cheating-related videos.
· Fortnite has three-times as many cheaters as second-placed Overwatch, which got 9,279,829 hits.
· Aimbots account for double the amount of cheat queries as wallhacks for the 15 games in our study (43,228,197 vs. 26,340,664 views).
· Sweden is the country with the most cheating per capita, with 145 Google searches for cheats per million people.
At the last count, the game’s 350m users had totted up nearly 10.5 million years of gameplay. It’s no wonder gamers are getting played, too. The aimbots of Fortnite outnumber wallhacks 2:1, and are often used together with triggerbots to automatically aim and fire at opponents. Epic Games has “a zero tolerance policy for the usage of cheat software” and under that popular Fortnite YouTuber FaZe Jarvis has been issued a lifetime ban by the game’s creators in September 2019 after he created a new account on the platform to show his viewers a gameplay video using the Aimbot hack to win games. The video which was uploaded on his official YouTube channel had led to suspension as it went against the game’s anti-cheat policy.
In September 2020, FaZe Jarvis made a short comeback to the popular battle royale game Fortnite with a Twitch stream, by hiding his tag, however, the gaming company quickly figured out his account and blocked him as he was halfway through the game.
Cheating in video games has always been considered illegal as per the company’s terms and condition, but it can be only considered as illegal in the eyes of law if there is a bill passed that limits cheating.
Cheaters can be anyone, it can be you, me or the kids next door. According to the report figures, Sweden has the title of ‘World Champion’ for cheating, with the US and Australia sharing second place. Sweden is known for excellence in esports (example: the top three Swedish Fortnite players have combined winnings of over $1m) but it is important to note that egaming is believed to be relatively free of cheats. Perhaps Sweden’s swathes of gaming cheats are simply trying to emulate the skills of their local idols.
There are four major reasons why players cheat in a game: they’re stuck, they want to play God, they are bored with the game, or they want to play like a God. The overwhelming reason most players cheat is that they get stuck. According to Polish Academy of Sciences professor Grzegorz Pochwatko, and Universidade do Algarve professor Jean-Christophe Giger who are the authors of the book Cheating in video games – causes and some consequences, they shared, “In laboratories (including VRLab, Institute of Psychology, PAS) we use computer games for research purposes. Whatever the main goal, in every game we encounter various tasks to be accomplished, obstacles to overcome, and opponents that will try to stop us from doing so. Facing difficulties while striving to achieve game goals may create the temptation to cheat. In many cases cheaters may get away without any consequences of cheating in the digital reality of a game.”
Mainly there are two types of cheats that are popular when it comes to FPS games, the first is aimbots and the second is wall hacking. Aimbot uses code information to target automatically whereas the wallhack provides the cheater with a live guide to exactly where their opponents are – even if they’re out of view behind a wall.
But how do these cheaters cheat? Do not worry, we will not share that even if we know because if we do that might trigger/inspire someone else to cheat in games.