Bots and hardware cheats in video games: New challenges for game cybersecurity

The best video games are designed to be effort intensive. They require building experience – and the character – through time, and sometimes they even allow one to earn real money. No wonder then that they make for an attractive prospect for bad actors. Gaming bots and hardware cheats are on the rise and becoming significant challenges for game cybersecurity. They not only facilitate criminal money earnings but also give unscrupulous players (at an attractive price) the ability to super-enhance their in-game characters.

What techniques are they using and what can you do to stop them? Read on to find that out!

How do bots and hardware cheating work?

Rather than spending long hours within a game environment, cheaters are using bots – a type of Artificial Intelligence (AI)–based expert system software that plays a video game by itself – to advance through a title and build their in-game character, thus increasing its value. And if a game also involves being rewarded with real money or cryptocurrency, it then becomes theirs easily.

Some of them go even further and apply hardware cheats, i.e., modify their keyboard and mouse in a way that gives them super-human abilities. With such enhancements in place, they can, e.g., click 100 times faster than any human could, gaining an unfair advantage.

How do bots and hardware cheating harm game cybersecurity?

When in-game rewards or a higher-valued character are obtained through automation rather than earned at a regular pace by humans, their actual value diminishes. Cheaters frustrate those who play fairly, making the game less fun for them.

What is more, the use of bots and hardware cheats not only spoils the experience for legitimate players but also ruins the game security and publishers’ business model. Without gaming protection against those fraudsters, the title suffers from fewer in-app purchases, larger churn and a damaged reputation.

Enter Unbotify

Current cheat prevention software can detect any changes made to a device (e.g., a PC), but they can’t detect modifications made to the hardware (e.g., hard drive or computer mouse). But if you’re a game publisher, you’re no longer left helpless in this struggle. We have just relaunched to the market Denuvo Unbotify, an AI-driven technology that goes beyond detecting bots.

This gaming protection technology monitors all the interactions with the game through a number of elements: the amount of clicks, how fast the clicks happen and where they are taking place on the screen, as well as on mobile where the angle of the touch, gyroscope and accelerometer also play a role. It then compares those interactions with what is considered normal for that specific game, highlighting through anomaly detection who is operating outside the parameters.

This solution can be applied to ensure game cybersecurity for mobile games, consoles, PC and web-based games, both in free-to-play and premium titles. Once a cheater is detected, you can decide the course of action for his or her account.

Try it today!

To learn more about this most recent addition to our gaming protection suite, visit this webpage.