#Data collection for different apps

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

floral garnet
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Hey there!

So I was curious to learn about how game cheats work (such as aimbot) and learned, that necessary data is collected and then thecheat modifies the character based on the data collected. The content creator (whomstvideo I watched to learn) never showed how they collected the data so I thought I'd ask here: how do cheats collect data such as player position, or should I say, where does it get the dat a from? Does it intercept the data that gets sent between player and server, if so, how is this done. Are there also other ways data gets sent/stored? If we say we take a survival game, presume data (such as a players inventory) is temp saved somewhere. How can I find such data?

waxen holly
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it reads the player data and the server-player data

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in some cases, some cheat for online games, just exploit bugs

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For instance, if the server does not really do proper business input checking, you could have your player "teleport" and the game server says that's what's happening

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I collected 300K gold, and server says, that's within the range, cool stuff.

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If the client has to display current game or minimap, then it knows "local user position" because otherwise the time delay would be too large == too much lag

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so if you know where that information is in memory, then you can just read the hexadecimal and act upon it.

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In some games, they moved those every few release, but the cheat engine, just kept releasing new versions with the if version use address X instead

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then game started using windows process list to detect other binaries to avoid aimbot and similar cheats...

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then they added DRM, etc.

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in one case, they detected winehq or codeweavers and refused that person to play

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there is various debugging tool to know where stuff frequently change in memory in windows

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and there is a pretty good disassembler tool for the USA gov too

floral garnet
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What would be the best way to find the memory containing the data (if language relevant, what would be the best way for python?)

waxen holly
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there is tools for that, I don't recall, try google

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basically you need to inject your sniffer inside the app or between the app and the server "wireshark"

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if the stuff is HTTPS / SSL, then only inside the app 😄

misty cliff
waxen holly
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ghidra was the one I forgot the name thanks @misty cliff

misty cliff
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Ive used IDA Pro before too, I find its easier to reverse iOS applications w/ IDA than Ghidra

waxen holly
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there is a bunch of these

misty cliff
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radare2 is another good one

waxen holly
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one has hard disk sniff

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another one has memory sniff

misty cliff
waxen holly
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fuzzing is used by google against linux in the CI/CD pipeline 😄

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for finding bugs

misty cliff
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or exploits ;)

waxen holly
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well some old videos games were "solved" using integer overflow, buffer overflow and similar logical bugs

misty cliff
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old video games are ez mode :)

waxen holly
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I liked the one, where the guy entered 3 specific Japanese username in save mode

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then ended up in the final scene of the last castle 🤣

floral garnet
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Thank you both so much :D this will be very useful!

waxen holly
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it's using a buffer overflow on the 12th sprite due to a whistle bug 😄
to execute "6502 binary assembly code" that are written using Japanese symbol on the login screen...