Valve Sets Trap in Dota 2 to Catch and Ban 40,000 Cheaters

Well, that’s devious. To catch cheaters in Dota 2, Valve resorted to setting up a trap inside the game, which ended up ensnaring over 40,000 players. 

The company has since permanently banned all 40,000 accounts for using third-party software
“over the last few weeks” to cheat in the competitive multiplayer title. Valve says it caught the cheaters red-handed because the third-party software allowed them “to access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay.”

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Game companies usually move quickly to fix such vulnerabilities. But Valve took it a step further by developing a “honeypot” trap capable of detecting which players were using third-party software to access the exploit. 

“This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits,” Valve said(Opens in a new window) on Tuesday. “Each of the accounts banned today read from this ‘secret’ area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.”

The move is also intended to send a message to would-be cheaters. “While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible, and use it to make our position clear,” the company said.

Valve didn’t say how the exploits worked. But using third-party software to read hidden data in a Dota 2 session could reveal information about another player’s location on a map or their stats. 

Valve also noted: “If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you’re playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota. This includes professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events.

“As before, we will continue to detect and remove these exploits as they come, and continue to ban users who cheat,” the company added. In the meantime, numerous banned users have taken to the Dota 2 forums to claim they were wrongly booted from the game.