Dota 2’s smart honeypot setup lured out 40,000 cheaters

Third-party software in video games, especially that kind of software that damages the experience of others, is not welcomed. Valve’s popular MOBA, Dota 2, has been suffering from this type of activity, where players who have been able to read a “secret” area in the client flagged them as perpetrators. Valve has announced that 40,000 accounts using this type of software have been banned, and has reminded that cheaters are not welcome in Dota 2.

With that said, Dota 2 has received a new update which allowed the developer to catch these players, and to further protect its players from malicious cheaters.

With that goal in mind, we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this “secret” area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.

Furthermore, Valve continued:

The prevalence of this family of cheats means that today’s ban wave is particularly large, but it’s only the latest action in an ongoing campaign. While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible, and use it to make our position clear: If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you’re playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota. This includes professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events.