Hacking against hackers

[asaguda]

Hacking. We've all encountered it at some point. Material/Texture hacks, aimbots, wallhacks, no recoil, anything the hacker wants to improve his imaginary skills with likely exist. Luckily, NDH's main game, TF2, contains very little hackers in VAC servers due to VAC being excellent. Unfortunately for Modern Warfare 2, the same cannot be said.

With that out of the way.

Over the many years I've been gaming I've noticed a few players- Mostly in MW2 due the abundance of hacking in that game- No, I'm not jawing away at VAC not banning them. I just leave the game if I encounter a hacker, as should everyone else.
A few players start out playing legit, they look all fine and dandy in killcams for several rounds. Then a hacker joins in and ends up on my team, and suddenly that legit player starts being an obnoxious, very obvious hacker. The fun thing is, he seemed to stop when the other hacker left the game. He left after that match, so I never got to ask him why.

So I wondered. Is hacking to combat hackers (Fighting fire with fire) more acceptable than just hacking for the hell of it? Or whatever reason people hack for nowadays. I tried asking in-game today, out of the three that replied, two said they felt more okay with that than hacking against everyone. The third said 'Well.. It's still hacking'.

tl;dr Is hacking to combat hackers and only other hackers more acceptable than just hacking?

I thought this'd be an interesting topic to bring up.

[Demon_Hunter]

You are better off reporting the player.
Hacking against him will just give him a chance to report the guy hacking to stop his hacking.
So hacking to stop another hacker is not acceptable.

Tough if u get a hacker in gmod or tf2. u can have alot of fun messing with him with admin mod or w/e.
Cause then they will usually rage, and u can post it on youtube .

[asaguda]

You are better off reporting the player.
Hacking against him will just give him a chance to report the guy hacking to stop his hacking.
So hacking to stop another hacker is not acceptable.

Tough if u get a hacker in gmod or tf2. u can have alot of fun messing with him with admin mod or w/e.
Cause then they will usually rage, and u can post it on youtube .

Unfortunately I know VAC is fully automated. You can't be reported per se. Hacking against a hacker, in MW2's case, leaves the hacker no option but to ragequit to find a server without hackers. 8D

It's funny. Sometimes I get accused of hacking because I 'accidentally' stumble around a corner where a teammate died a few moments ago, only to shoot the player who shot my teammate. And they say they'll report me to VAC because I am hacking and I have to go to hell. I take it as a compliment, really.

[Demon_Hunter]

Thing is. If u hack to stopp a hacker. u are gonna get banned by vac urself. so its a rather stupid thing to do. because vac will still ban u even tough u had good intentions.

[asaguda]

Thing is. If u hack to stopp a hacker. u are gonna get banned by vac urself. so its a rather stupid thing to do. because vac will still ban u even tough u had good intentions.

That was an original concern of mine, and being a server hoster I keep slightly up to date on new hacks, actually. MW2 has a bad implementation of VAC, otherwise there wouldn't be so many hackers and the whole point would be moot- Why do VAC's job when it does it better than I can? Either way, most hacks are detected when they inject their code into the game's memory, but nowadays thanks to Vista and 7's Aero graphics, there are now hacks that do not contain any 'hack' related features. They don't inject code to read the game or give you an aimbot, and they only ever read memory. Thanks to Aero, the hack reads memory, does some math and then presents the information to you on an invisible overlay over the game.
These are called 'external hacks'.
EDIT2: The good thing is that external hacks can't do as much as normal hacks. You can't change your speed to that of a jet engine on a kids tricycle, for example. You can't turn off recoil either. Things like that require code injection, which as mentioned is how the majority, if not nearly all hackers get caught.

So far, from what I've read, external hacks are undetected by VAC simply because the only way for VAC to detect them would be to search the harddrive and running processes, which would be illegal as far as I know, if done without user permission, and even then most external hacks don't do any 'hack related features'.
EDIT: In fact, most authors state a 99.9% undetectability, and say it is very unlucky if you get banned. Most likely it's due to the way you've used the hack, they say, but VAC doesn't work that way, you can't report someone to VAC no matter how obvious of a hacker they are.


This explains the outrageous amount of hackers in MW2- They can't get caught. In other VAC games, they can be kicked and banned from servers, whereas in MW2 they're free to roam around shooting you in the head through walls.
I wasn't saying I'd start to hack to beat other hackers (Most of them can see you through the walls only, and their aim is still too bad to kill me before I kill them, most of the time), but rather I was asking whether or not that would be a more acceptable form of hacking. If someone takes something from you, it's acceptable to take it back, yes?

[Foozy]

If someone takes something from you, it's acceptable to take it back, yes?

This sums up the whole debate, and it's an age-old dilemma. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. By counter-hacking, you're implying that hacking is okay, and it never is. In the end, more and more people will cheat if you take the fight fire with fire approach, since there'll be people fighting the hackers, and people fighting the counter-hackers because they believe they're also hacking for the hell of it.

There should be systems to combat hacking, and if they're not present you should consider if this really is a game you want to play. By quitting the game(or even better, not buying it in the first place) you show the developers that a game without a refined anti cheat system is not acceptable, given the current technological possibilities.

So to answer your question: No, but you definitely might be tempted to do so.

[asaguda]

Either way, I sorta think the problem will fix itself. After a while the only players left in MW2 will be the hardcore, really super awesome good ones, and the hackers, and from what I've seen hackers only get their frags because they know you're around a particular corner, where as I have to round it and react first. They rely on shooting first.

[Buzz]

Simple answer... KILL ALL HACKERS!!!!!



But seriously, if you play with hacks to try to combat hackers, then your simply playing into their hands from my point of view:)

[asaguda]

I have, in the past week, encountered four hackers.
Not a single one of them went positive, even with their super awesome leet wallhax.
If you hack and still can't win, you're doing it wrong.