From PC Mag: Well, that’s devious. To catch cheaters in Dota 2, Valve resorted to setting up a trap inside the game, which ended up ensnaring over 40,000 players.
The company has since permanently banned all 40,000 accounts for using third-party software
“over the last few weeks” to cheat in the competitive multiplayer title. Valve says it caught the cheaters red-handed because the third-party software allowed them “to access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn't visible during normal gameplay.”
Game companies usually move quickly to fix such vulnerabilities. But Valve took it a step further by developing a “honeypot” trap capable of detecting which players were using third-party software to access the exploit.
“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,” Valve said(Opens in a new window) on Tuesday. “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.”
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