The company's anti-cheating system is constantly evolving to fight hackers

Feb 18, 2014 04:25 GMT  ·  By

Valve boos Gabe Newell has explained just what its studio's Anti-Cheat system (VAC) is examining on a user's computer, clarifying any rumors about tracking the websites visited by a player, for example.

Valve's Anti-Cheat system is predominantly used in its first-person shooter titles like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or Team Fortress 2.

Yesterday, however, a nasty rumor appeared claiming that VAC was looking through a user's computer in order to see if he visited known cheating website, and sending that data back to Valve, alongside all the other websites he or she visited.

In an unprecedented move, Valve's Gabe Newell took to Reddit to explain just how VAC works.

"VAC checked for the presence of these cheats. If they were detected VAC then checked to see which cheat DRM server was being contacted. This second check was done by looking for a partial match to those (non-web) cheat DRM servers in the DNS cache. If found, then hashes of the matching DNS entries were sent to the VAC servers," he said.

"The match was double checked on our servers and then that client was marked for a future ban. Less than a tenth of one percent of clients triggered the second check. 570 cheaters are being banned as a result."

Newell also emphasized that hackers are fighting against VAC not just through cheats but also through negative rumors that aim at tainting the reputation of Valve and its software.

"There is also a social engineering side to cheating, which is to attack people’s trust in the system. If "Valve is evil – look they are tracking all of the websites you visit" is an idea that gets traction, then that is to the benefit of cheaters and cheat creators," the Valve boss added.

"VAC is inherently a scary looking piece of software, because it is trying to be obscure, it is going after code that is trying to attack it, and it is sneaky. For most cheat developers, social engineering might be a cheaper way to attack the system than continuing the code arms race, which means that there will be more Reddit posts trying to cast VAC in a sinister light."

As such, Steam users shouldn't be afraid of VAC looking into their private data and Valve only cares about stopping cheats.