Hackers, actual reality or creation of imagination?

ID:275579
 
Jun 2 2004, 9:18 am
I was wondering if hacking a game on Byond is really easy or not, because it happens I have been getting a ton of e-mails regarding "hackers" hacking the systems and changing variables and such in the game I made.

Now is this actually possible or should I disregard these e-mails, and how likely is it that this happens if so? What could I do to combat such things?
Jun 2 2004, 9:20 am
Jon Snow wrote:
I was wondering if hacking a game on Byond is really easy or not, because it happens I have been getting a ton of e-mails regarding "hackers" hacking the systems and changing variables and such in the game I made.

Now is this actually possible or should I disregard these e-mails, and how likely is it that this happens if so? What could I do to combat such things?

Save file editors, if they can host they game without an edit command they can do what they may with save file editors

I.E http://games.byond.com/hub/XzDoG/SaveFileEditorHacker
Jun 2 2004, 9:22 am
In response to XzDoG
thanks for the insight, however I am being e-mailed by hosts on this matter complaining about hackers, not actual hosts themselves hacking...
Jun 2 2004, 9:23 am
Jon Snow wrote:
I was wondering if hacking a game on Byond is really easy or not, because it happens I have been getting a ton of e-mails regarding "hackers" hacking the systems and changing variables and such in the game I made.

That depends. If they're running their own server, it's relatively easy to use a memory editor to change variables in the game. As far as going in and editing a game on someone else's server... chances are either your e-mails are mistaken, or you've got some exploitable bugs that need fixing.
Jun 2 2004, 9:30 am
In response to Jon Snow
Its always possible that the host has a trojan or something...

Outside of an actual hacking program being involved (befriend host, send trojan to host, edit hosts savefiles), I've never heard any reports from reliable people of this actually happening.
Jun 2 2004, 9:33 am
In response to Foomer
A lot of players (BYOND, Counter-Strike, etc, etc...) refer to cheating in a game (Changing in-game variables via a third-party hexadecimal editor) to be "hacking."

(In CS, there was a time when people would just randomly shout out "OMG WALLHAX!!!11" -_- )

~Kujila
Jun 2 2004, 9:37 am
In response to Kujila
Yeah, I love hacking games :)

But it only works if the game is singleplayer, or you're the host.

Too bad I never got to be the host.
Jun 3 2004, 8:02 am
In response to Kujila
Kujila wrote:

(In CS, there was a time when people would just randomly shout out "OMG WALLHAX!!!11" -_- )

Was? Heh
Jun 3 2004, 8:19 am
In response to Kujila
Kujila wrote:
A lot of players (BYOND, Counter-Strike, etc, etc...) refer to cheating in a game (Changing in-game variables via a third-party hexadecimal editor) to be "hacking."

BYOND stores little to nothing in the way of actual data clientside; the server tells the client what to display, and the client just sends the server commands. This drastically reduces the damage that a client player can do with an editor, but also makes it very prone to loopholes in command input; it's pretty easy to trick DS into sending commands that you're not supposed to be able to send. It's comparatively simple to catch this sort of stuff, but you have to go through your code pretty thoroughly to make sure you've got all the holes covered.
Jun 3 2004, 8:27 am
In response to Leftley
I might add that some guy wrote a decent article on cheating and BYOND, with some good tips for preventing it. The article discusses why BYOND clients can't do much to cheat as Leftley said, and for those using savefiles, there's an associated library you can use to encrypt them and prevent hacking.
Jun 3 2004, 9:10 am
In response to Maz
Heh :D Well, I see faaaaarrr less cheating in 1.6 than I did in prior versions.

~Kujila