Valve used secret memory access "honeypot" to detect 40K Dota 2 cheaters

Further Reading

In a blog post this week, Valve revealed the existence of this trap, which was released as part of an earlier update to the game. Valve says that update included "a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay." But that memory could be read by third-party cheat tools that used exploits to sniff out (and share) internal data normally invisible to players.

To activate its honeypot trap, all Valve had to do was watch for any accounts that tried to read from that "secret" memory area, an event that would lead to "extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved," according to Valve.

Further Reading

Now that Valve's honeypot has been revealed publicly, though, similar systems seem a lot less likely to be effective at catching cheaters in the future. A careful cheat maker could likely analyze a game's memory structure to carefully pinpoint only valid and useful memory addresses, then design their cheat tools to only access that "safe" data in a harder-to-detect manner.

Still, as a pure message-sending power play, it's hard to beat a big reveal showing how, exactly, you caught tens of thousands of cheaters who probably thought they were untouchable. And as the cat-and-mouse battle continues, Valve promises it will "continue to detect and remove these exploits as they come, and continue to ban users who cheat."