Game Hacking – Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC)

Summary

IntroIn 2002 Valve created an Anti-Cheat solution called “Valve Anti-Cheat” aka VAC. The first game they implemented VAC into was Counter-Strike. When VAC was introduced it only operated in User Mode (Still does) meaning it runs entirely in user space and has no kernel component.Below is a list of games that use VAC.. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Counter-Strike (video game) Counter-Strike: Condition Zero Counter-Strike: Source Counter-Strike 2 Day of Defeat Day of Defeat: Source Deathmatch Classic Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Half-Life Deathmatch: Source Ricochet Team Fortress Team Fortress Classic A longer list can be found here .VAC-cident?So.. if you don’t know VAC has been around for quite a while, at the time of writing it’ll be 23 years. Over the time they’ve made some mistakes but who doesn’t? (Taken from wikipedia) - In July 2010, [snip] Approximately 12,000 owners of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 were banned when Steam updated a DLL file on disk after it had been loaded into memory by the game, causing a false positive detection. These bans were revoked and those affected received a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 or an extra copy to send as a gift. - In October 2023, certain users of AMD graphics cards were banned from Counter-Strike 2 after AMD added support for their "Anti-Lag+" feature via a driver update, which the game flagged as a cheat due to it detouring certain DLL functions. AMD subsequently withdrew the driver update and Valve pledged to unban any affected users. This post isn’t created to bash Valve they clean up after their mistakes and listen to their community, gotta love devs when they do that. I also commend them because getting VAC banned isn’t such a slap on the wrist. Getting VAC banned has some stipulations such as:Having the VAC ban show on your Steam profileBeing banned from all “GoldSrc” gamesBeing banned from all “Source engine” games (The Counter-Strike serise)Not being able to refund the game you’re VAC ba...