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He Exposed the Truth and Got Hacked
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- Opublikowany 12 mar 2023
- A third update on the Tarkov Cheating Situation - G0at’s computer suffers retributive malware attack.
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Nauka i technika
Pro tip for people doing research: don't install shady software on your computer, use a virtual machine.
In most cases, sure. But in this case it likely would not have helped. People who know computers well enough to root kit your system and fry your drives can tell if youre on a VM.
I mean I guess will do but Isn't a virtual machine still able to access your actual computer? It has to in order for you to interact with it? So I take it it's just safer but not airtight by any means?
Alternative is to buy a shitty throwaway pc probably one from eBay that can play stuff on low settings. Then use your router to isolate the device from other items on the network.
They could have used this advice today
Idk how they did this without calling SOG or someone from L1 Techs first
If there's only one thing that people should take out of this whole situation is that by installing cheat software, you're essentially handing over the keys to your PC to whomever made the software.
@Gramini well it's not the game developers faults that cheaters use custom kernels. I know it's invasive, but what choice do they have? They don't have to waste money on developing anti-cheat solutions for consoles, so you either spend millions on server side anti-cheat for only one platform like an idiot or you spend a few thousand on user side anti-cheat and be done with it. Which makes more economical sense? The fact that you have to have some form of anti-cheat on only one platform is already pretty stupid.
I remember one time.
Like 4/5 years ago, I tried to launch a mod menu for GTA online (my main use of it was to make flying cars.).
And windows defender deleted all files of it as soon as I executed it, even the compressed file it was into.
No sympathy for these people.
@Blahorga Slisk i mean linux is a pretty safe bet imho, considering they banned UMN for pulling the shit that they did.
but honestly at this point in our society, at least we can commend transparency more than vague promises that companies make on a daily basis.
@Gramini Well no, there are truly no different layers of privileges to a software you install on your computer. Most always the software requires administrator privileges at point of installation. Pwnd. If it doesn't it probably exploits some known bug in windows to elevate those privileges. There is a million ways to get/cheat/scam elevated privileges, and as far as I'm concerned a semi-compromised system is a compromised system.
If he still has those drives, it might be a neat idea to have the lab take a look at them.
Ye
@Operator 801 You mean like Dan? :D
Replying to up this idea!
They are fried lol, there is not much to take a look at; I think thats the point...
@EFDB Jon that's nice but not everything is about you bud
i like how all this happened right, the guys that made the cheats nukes the guy who exposed thems drives, this doesnt help the cheat company, now everyone who downloaded their cheats officially and 100% knows that at any time the folk who made the cheat can fry the drives of anyone using their cheat software, thats gonna lose them a lot of customers lol.
open source cheats 😎
As long as it feeds the end-user's ego and their wallets, nothing will ever change ...
@Baptiste M sure, in the realm of possibilities it is not impossible, but it is very, highly unlikely, that he would even *need* to do it much less want to.
as for everyone that downloads cheats, it isn't going to stop them from downloading cheats from a fishy website because they probably got the game from a fishy website at the same cost.
You'd think this was gonna lose them a lot of customers, but remember. Most of those customers are young gamers, who already put up with a lot of nonsense from the legitimate part of the gaming market. I mean, we've now come to a point where games being unfinished out of the gate and taking months (or sometimes even longer, or never) to get properly fixed, loot boxes, pay to win, endless DLCs that add little to the game, your game no longer working when the company decides to shut down their servers, with no option to run your own servers, etc... etc... etc... have all been normalised.
Let's face it. Gamers have been taking it up the exhaust vent for years now, and most of them no longer care about whose rod is inserted, nor what they're doing back there,, as long as they get their promised free ice cream at the end.
Always use a separate computer on its own VLAN that is separate from your local lan. Better, set up its own special internet connection, not connected to your home internet. Security is everything in this type of investigations.
If You are talking about the dark net, keep a loaded gun and a non-internet surveillance system around your property.
@LordRomasona exactly, any abstraction can be sufficiently exploited.
99% of you don't know what you're talking about, ask a professional.
A VLAN nor a second internet connection will not save you in this instance, it is trivial to get past that level of separation. Once a system is made vulnerable, and targeted, the only thing that will help is virtualisation, a hardware firewall and a completely physically separated network aka air-gap. Even then, with access to hardware, you are still screwed.
You can still get past that in Net Security. Same with VPN and VMs.
I’ve worked in the field for several years now, and I’m a server admin, we have extra precautions even for that sorta stuff, because you can disrupt a server that a VM is running on
Happened to be in a group call by accident with some cheat devs years ago, can confirm that "narcissistic sociopath" would be a kind description of the type of person it takes.
@Owen Tuck Sarcasm duly noted ... and ignored :p
@3nertia thank you for enlightening me with your incredible knowledge. I feel like I really learnt something today 😁
@Owen Tuck Did you know that you can be confident without being a maniacal egomaniac/narcissist? 😱
Welcome to capitalism which encourages such personality traits heh
Some of them for sure, but lots of cheat devs just want money and the users want to compete in a world where everyone cheats (or they want to bot accounts to a high level and then sell the account)
Bless Linus for the "We have to get people up to speed."
Really appreciate the overview!
This is Ironic
They talk about it then it happens BAD
Was thinking the same thing
yr
My favorite part of this talk was where they almost got hacked.
If only you had waited for a week 😅
Haaqh.. ha
Now they were the ones being hacked lol
@RuinFoxno. The point of the video is to talk about the person who was hacked, you clearly can't read.
@sortacasual its like saying you like the coffee in Costa. no shit.
Speaking of getting hacked, this video aged well 😏
The cheat devs probably uploaded some kind of virus that (among other things) wiped the firmware of the drives. There are these kind of programs out there that you commonly don't come across - I mean, nowadays virus development is commercialized with all that cryptoware non-sense. Also remember that this cheat had all permissions, and was likely acting from the Kernel, thus it having free access to internal interfaces.
@the bog I'm pretty sure (without proof) that the firmwares of drives have other kind of bugs, glitches or debug features (All undocumented, or even unknown to the manufacturer) that may put the drive into a bricked state. I'd wager that such a drive could be recovered through a professional data recovery service. Or if recoverable through software means, then not using a program that's publicly available.
However, I'd guess that the manufacturer of goats drives may be interested to take a look.
That’s not how that works though. SSDs require signed firmware binaries, even if they had kernel access it’s not like that gives you full control over the SSD. More than likely the cheat devs just trimmed his SSD to death, although that would take days off time at m.2 write speeds
Maybe you guys could ask g0at for his "nuke" nvme,ssd,hdd and take a look at them? It would be interesting to know if the nuke was only software related or if it was a hardware related
They would need to make sure when they looked into this nvme (if they get it) or other components that it is air gapped and use hardware they are willing to lose.
Meanwhile, Team Fortress 2 has been openly assaulted by cheaters non stop for over three years and about as much is being done...
@1sMiku VAC absolutely doesn't work fine. The approach of an almost solely signature-based anticheat in this day and age is ridiculous. You can automate actions on any operating system as well, it's not Linux specific.
@1sMiku tons use windows as well. No anticheat will ever be fully effective on linux anyway. Valve has put little to no effort into detecting linux cheats for both csgo and tf2. There’s plenty of shitty free cheats for linux that havent been detected in 3+ years.
@Imglad Notu the only reason Linux has anything to do with this is because the bot clients run on Linux since that's how people have figured out how to control them automatically (and with good performance I assume), the standalone cheats work great on Windows too
Oh and don't question VAC either, most people have no idea what the fuck VAC was even made for
@John Marston don't fault an entire kernel that is developed by volunteers, and is also the same kernel being used as the backbone for the very same servers that allow you to play with other goymers, just because valve didn't do their due dilligence and remove the production version and only have it available for the dedicated hosting software for the game.
I believe if you cheat or make cheat in China on Tencent games there's a good chance of getting arrested. However cheats for game like Apex Legends are blatently sold online with no covers. There's even people advertising aimbots on certain video platforms.
So I very much doubt whether the arrests there are related to Tarkov.
@Cpt Otis Atleast for PUBG mobile that's a nope, owned by Tencent
Back in the wild west of Apex, you'd get bots blasting shit in chinese. Translated, these were apparently ads for hacks.
"There's even people advertising aimbots on certain video platforms."
PLclip:
Yeah let's allow Pitch advertising
@Sterling Archer its a korean game
This aged well
This is the peak of irony
I am glad that I have never downloaded cheats. I never wanted or needed to cheat ever, but I did figure people would put root kits in their software. Its the most sensible thing to do if you want to ensure people dont get information if there is any communication to their own servers.
Hopefully all the people who bought this cheat software now realize their computer/info is now extremely vulnerable.
The only thing that will ever totally get rid of cheating is to get rid of its benefits, and that'll never happen. For many people, the feeling of getting as much of what they want as they can and circumventing anything that gets in their way gives them a huge dopamine rush.
The arrested person was likely also doing more than just selling cheats
@Osmosis Jones -100000000 social credit
@Frietje Oorlog Informing young people on the incident that didn't happen in Tianmen.
Watching Winnie the Pooh.
i love watching this PodCast i always end up feeling stupid by the end lol
The gaming community is an insane monster. The sheer foothold it has on things is severely underestimated in many ways and its moments like this one or the d&d thing that bring it into the light
Welcome to capitalism!
I'll just say I found this after searching LTT hacked.
I stopped playing mp games because you cannot escape cheaters. Especially at higher ranks. If you start winning they get butthurt and turn on their instakill aimbots and teleport all over the map
@r3mxd in a fair fight? Yes ill accept defeat. But when people literally teleport all over the map and just hold down the trigger and everyone dies in like 5 seconds when previously you were winning, no thats some bullshit
sounds like skill issue.
I just want good singleplayer video games with custom player content creation tools like Halo, Garry's Mod, DOOM (1990s), etc
This clip didn’t age well😂
A lot of games ban users who use VM in general these days which is weird. So I recommend a dump PC on the side that is cheap to test on with stuff like this. Installing software known for cheating games has its backdoors or other things that people don't know about so he ate the cake at this point.
@KabusThePotato Jesus.... Not just Intel ME. I wanna cry my eyes out.
@FiecyLick amd PSP
@Phasma I mean yeah you don't want to use the same disks of course. Second chip for uefi does sound new to me so I'm learning something knew out of that. I do know Intel creates these backdoors in general for the motherboards for the Government to access. Some say conspiracy when its been looked into. I haven't seen anything like that on AMD products yet as far as I know but I know I've always preferred AMD hardware since Open-source and easier to use their Drivers and setups for my Arch Linux systems.
You are right. However the only hardware I would consider needing replacement are the disk's and if possible a second chip for uefi.
problem is tarkov is pretty intensive, so your "dump pc" can't just be your grampa's old office rig, you're gonna actually have to invest some money in it. i do agree that a whole seperate system is the best way to do it, its just not easy
The HDR standards are well defined. The problem is that the manufacturers don't certify their products well enough or give specs more than necessary.
What a irony..now they are hacked
Yep didn't age well
This is why if you are going to do something crazy, you should use a virtual machine. When you install a rootkit on a SSD that doesn't actually exist, the damage is less severe.
Linus, do a video on how to diagnoase/fix your system after a hacker attack.
I mean, just as you said, people developing cheats ate not the most trustworthy persons, so their alleged arrest doesn't even need to be due to cheating itself. There is high possibility they also did other black-hat stuff, did any number of other illegal things, or simply just didn't report their taxes and tried to hide income...
I had someone on reddit try arguing with me that installing cheats wasn't outright infecting your system with malware.
little did we know that 9 days later you would be hacked :(
Wish there was a possibility for people to make a bot like the dogebot mod from attack on titan tribute game by fenglee, the bot literally looked for certain criteria (and did it VERY well) and then would ban the person accordingly, and it takes note of their ID's to keep them banned if the bot is still running.
And aottg was unity based too, so there's that
Well, this aged poorly
you guys should do more videos about how viruses work, its really interesting
I'm pretty sure in the social credit system cheating in games was a way to lose them
This did NOT age well.....
I'm glad Goat got new equipment for his computer shame he got retributive attacked
Then you have EngineOwning who just gets a 3 million dollar lawsuit and still gets to sell cheats
Selling cheats is major cringe. Creating cheats for personal use on the other hand, it is an incredibly valuable resource for understanding core programming principles. As long as you do it for yourself and aren't ruining the fun of others like a jerk: personal games, you are entirely fine in my book.
@R07 The main point of my comment is not about the people who buy cheats. It's about the value of understanding how they work. Buying cheats to ruin other people's fun is cringe-worthy behavior. Buying cheats in general is also cringe-worthy, but it can be valuable in the context of g0at's video. I don't understand why you're trying to derail the conversation by presenting statistics that you blatantly made up.
99% of cheaters buy cheats. More than like you’re not going to find people that even know how to program in the first place
@Imglad Notu yea.
@no no.
0.1% cheaters are fitting this description.
I love listening to this in the background while working on videos or stream stuff ✨
Imagine installing a cheat software not expecting those lowlifes won't install backdoor alongside it.
Maximum irony with that title after today’s events.
Linus just for future vods concerning videogame cheaters in China, apparently esports is an industry there. So of course there are laws that punish cheating in games severely.
When the cheat developers punish a user, only proving that it's unsafe to install cheats on your machine.
@Linus please make a celebrity PC build for this man. You and Luke kinda stoked the fire on this one... and it'd be good publicity for you.
Sick. If cheats are off the game I will actually play it again.
Damn. LMG clips is blowing up. I remember sometime ago this channel had 200k sub. Now it has 500k+
It’s just so handy for getting a much more condensed version of WAN Show and in a way more digestible format. I legit don’t have the time to sit through a live WAN Show or watch an entire vod of it.
Well guys, you know what kind of content you need to focus more on now!
Honestly, it was worth it, if you ask me. The cost of a new PC to expose the pervasive nature of cheating and the unethical nature of cheat-developers, much less getting them hemmed up for the additional crimes of destroying his hardware with a rootkit.
When the goons who did this get hemmed up it's all going to stack.
Long-term, crime does not pay.
He exposed the truth and got hacked^(squared). Big oof moment 9 days later.
Now you have to do a custom build for him in the lab!
That title sure aged well
They likely deleted the gpt/mbr, windows has undocumented functions in their dll's that can be called from user level, if you run any shady software, they have more than just the option to block you
@Spiker985 Studios Indeed. I also wish they'd respect that boundary the other direction, and quit putting "system" areas in my user directories.
The folder tree in explorer needs an option to just show the damned disks by default.
I feel like Windows has so many User Space accessible APIs which should *never* exist, because that's the entire point of having a distinction of User Space and Kernel Space
On the nvme drive thing, if you use a secure wipe method (google secure flash wipe arch) that isn’t supported, it will brick your nvme. So you have to know what you’re doing if you’re doing a secure wipe of an nvme. Inversely if you know what you’re doing and or are ignorant of how to do it properly you can accidentally or purposely use an unsupported method with the nvme. Completely jacks the drive up and bricks it.
@the bog If you force an unsupported method, or if its connected to a raid controller, you can def brick your drive. Not only have I done it before, but others have before as well by accident, that's why there are warnings listed in the documentation. Go face palm yourself my dude. You can make it to where the controller doesn't recognize the storage at all. This effectively bricks the drive. Particularly with the nvme-cli tool. ESPECIALLY if you use the nvme sanitize command and reboot during it. The drive will no longer be usable until it completes. ADDITIONALLY Certain Lenovo BIOS when you set a secure password and reboot fuck up the drive to where the drive won't be recognized on reboot, thus bricking it for your system. There are plenty of ways to brick an NVME, all documented with warnings. I NEVER said doing a simple secure erase would do it by itself, only that using the tools improperly, or if intentionally doing something improperly, you CAN and WILL brick your NVME.
🤦♂️ it’s not going to brick your NVME a wipe is only accessing and overwriting blocks of storage, the SSDs controller and onboard memory isn’t affected by a secure wipe
guess who also got hacked 😂
I was about to comment the same
The irony
Looool
Yeah I would say the reason those guys get arrested is probably not because they make cheats, but because they monetize them and don't pay their taxes on it. You can't escape taxes.
And now you've been hacked!
yes
It's actually really fun to cheat 🙃 . A machine you created to play for you is cool and interesting to watch.
@TruFire710 or click
bait
Linus should have taken his own advice XD
they probably used something like hdparm to overwrite parts of the firmware in the drive. could be fixed but that takes a bit of effort
Sounds like taking goat's PC and making a video about it would make great content
Yeah, except maybe by a channel that:
1. Is actually qualified to do computer forensics and, 2. Didn't literally just get pwned as well.
When I watched this Live, I had the feeling that LMG will be hacked now that they talked about it.😐
You guys should hook him up with some gear :-)
Linus, you should do a forensic analysis of his dead machine.
Not sure if its the cheating part that gets them busted but i would guess since they run an operation like that they wuld also evade taxes...
I'm sure it's probably just coincidental timing but I had my boot NVMe drive nuked during a Windows green screen while updating Radeon drivers. It was broke to the point of not being able to boot into Windows recovery and was no longer recognized in the BIOS.
@Z Mine was a 1TB Sabrant Rocket.
980 pro 2tb?
According to my friend who lived in china, Cheating in online video game is illegal there, you will get fined or arrested if you get caught doing so.
If all they did was burn his drives, he honestly got off really easy lol
very surprised he never did this cheat stuff in a sandbox/virtual machine - cheat software has always been shady to me but after being in discord with the devs who made a very popular paid cheat for gmod they would just brag about how they had access to so many peoples computers because their cheat had a rat in it so they could mess with people they really don't like
You should look into how world of tanks handles cheating. It’s posts monthly updates listing the amount and names of every cheater. They demand that battle replays are turned on in competitions.
Reminds me of when I installed hacks for World of Tanks (Username is from when I was obsessed) to develop anti cheat tactics. Haven't played in years, but last I played, it was so bad that major clans REQUIRED hacks to join their team and the developers didn't care that people were advertising their hacks IN THE TOURNAMENTS MID MATCH. It was really fun for a bit though, sending a rabbit to set off player detection systems in the wrong direction, allowing for embarrassing flanks and ambushes, but it stopped being worth it when they started introducing pay to win tanks.
If the software they released has malware it could give reason for the arrest.
I feel like he got lucky that they only fried his stuff instead of stealing sensitive data.
I've never understood how these people have fun "not" playing the game.
Wear protection and use VMs before downloading shady software
Doubt it was the drivers or controller or anything like that, they probably just reformatted the drives to a non-windows filesystem.
This aged nicely
Ten dollars a day! Dam that’s crazy , I feel all poor now haha takes me forever just to get certain parts for my pc, paying bills and regular life necessities like food lol
maybe it’s like a drug addiction though and they are poor buying cheats. All I do is die trying to fight other players in Tarkov for the past months. Sometimes I’ve gotten lucky, crazy to think those people don’t know what that feeling is like when you finally win after dying nonstop for days. That’s the most satisfying addiction to a game like Tarkov. Little engine that could moment of luck you get.
In a world where AI is becoming so prevelent I cannot see why you couldn't have AI watch the player(s) screens and try to detect the likelihood of a player cheating
This is changes from a hard coded war to an AI learning war of AI cheats vs AI anti cheat. The AI cheat already exists
It's coming don't worry. Step by step.
Anyone here after the LTT hack?
A km switch for that 3d printer aimbot would work pretty well, just switch over when you want the aimbot going
They had me for 4:32, not gonna lie, and then they hit me with the Aussie
Have they looked at the Bungie lawsuits against cheaters? I know Bungie just recently won a case on it
NVME have firmware. You can Fritz that. Theoretically.
But they probably just messed with his bios settings
he probably could use recovery software.
Let me clue all of you uninitiated in on a little something. The amount of cheating that is in Tarkov is pretty much representative of any modern AAA FPS (except a very select few that are mostly asian-based with some really nasty ring 0 type "anti-cheat" .. basically malware.. attached)
And the type of cheating that goes on in all of these AAA FPS games is as nuanced and varied as that found in Tarkov
how goofy of him to not only install on his local drive but then not even do a wipe, man
More EFT drama!
fking LOVE it lmao
yeah i made the mistake of installing some work stuff on my personal pc, and i tried to remove it without authorization, had to format my drive, and after i formatted it my m.2 drive was fried
The game developers he talked about is the cycle, which is space tarkov light. A fun game which is like Tarkov meets fortnite with not building stuff.
Im switching back to that game because tarkov is even for me now too invested with cheater now everybody is leaving. I also left the cycle after 2 weeks last summer because i got into high elo and cheaters were very very very rampant on high elo.
about chinese cheating thing
there is a law that state "you can not make altercation on other's computer/electronic device without the owner's consent"
cheating in video game kinda falls under this law as it is altering the game's server and the game program in some way
and CCP can just arrest you for whatever the reason is so its prob just some guy reported those cheat devs to the CCP and then that's it
.
side note, there's a very big allegation about almost all tarkov sherpa in china was cheating and ruining the game in some other way for new player so prob the arrest is a result of that
Can we just go back to the days when cheats were fun and didn't hurt anyone else's experience? NHL 98 has some fantastic cheats.
And miss out on forcing users to pay for dlcs that essentially do the same thing as cheats? naaaaah
@Honkinator 22 agreed
some cheats are for fun in single player games but MP games should be cheat free.
@7:52 re: "undetectable cheats using robot arms"
You can record client actions server-side and use a neural network that has been trained to recognize cheaty behavior. The training data is the totality of "Overwatch" cases.
This method doesn't care what the client is doing re: software, 2-PC setups, packet sniffers, etc. because It's not trying to detect the cause of the illness, it's trying to detect the symptoms.
Well Linus exposed him and got HACKED
pretty much don't care about tarkov
but that exposing video was very interesting anyways.
and it has luke in an interview at the end.
Those cheats back available. On alternative places. And they were the largest but several are just as big and still readily available
Can't wait for them to upload the hard-r video.
Most nvme drives have firmware update capability, which could be easily corrupted.
I can confirm that 100% of this is correct. Most drives have firmware flashing capability because it is required for Microsoft certification, so you would almost have to find one that cannot be flashed on purpose. However, you can usually lock the firmware as well, IN THE FIRMWARE, meaning you can prevent such an attack if you really wanted, but also, attackers can brick drives as well, if they wanted, and would require a desolder of the chip to reflash working firmware.
It's pretty scary that even the most paranoid of people wouldn't even think to lock down their drive's reflashing feature, even if they had the tools available to do it.
@Cecil You would have to desolder the chip and use an external flasher if it is adequately nuked.
And just as easliy be re-flashed with stock firmware to recover...?