Video game cheating market on the rise, 80 websites rake in up to $73.2 million: Study

The study suggests that 80 online game cheating websites sell cheat subscriptions worth anywhere between $12.8 and $73.2 million annually.

Video game cheating softwares are available on the internet on a subscription basis. (Image Source: Microsoft Designer)

A new research suggests that “no anti-cheat system is unbreakable” and that it is common amongst hackers to bypass these security solutions. These game cheating solutions, which often bypass Microsoft’s Windows kernel defense mechanism are often up for purchase on the internet, fuelling a multi-million dollar industry.

The study, conducted by the University of Birmingham involved performing a technical analysis of how game cheats and anti-cheat measures work and analysed 80 game cheat-selling websites in Europe and North America for three months. Since selling game cheats is not illegal in most parts of the world, game cheats that offer gamers an unfair advantage in online multiplayer games like PUBG, Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends and others are quite popular in many parts of the world.

These cheating solutions are often available on a subscription basis, with the study suggesting that a one-month subscription can cost anywhere between $10 to $240. A quick conservative estimation by the researchers says that the total annual revenue generated by the tracked 80 websites amounts between $12.8 and $73.2 million, with anywhere between 30,000 to 1,74,000 people buying these cheats every month.

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Anti-cheat systems are like anti-tampering mechanisms, meaning they often look for any changes to the game’s code. Compared to normal programs, they run in the Windows kernel, which means have elevated privilege. A common example of kernel-level software is Crowdstrike, which caused millions of Windows PCs around the world to get stuck on the infamous blue screen of death (BSOD). Since these systems have higher privileges over other programs and are signed by Microsoft, they can also terminate applications like video games when a cheating software is detected tampering with the game code.

On the other hand, game cheating tools like the ones available online were commonly found bypassing the Windows kernel protections in place by injecting themselves as third-party drivers. During the study, the researchers also noticed that while Valorant and Fortnite had the most robust anti-cheat systems, Counter-Strike 2 and Battlefield 1 were the worst offenders. This is also correlated with the cost of these cheating solutions, meaning users have to pay more to cheat on Fortnite compared to Counter-Strike 2.

While this may not sound alarming, Dr Marius Meunch says that game-cheating software bypassing Windows kernel protections is something “largely ignored by the cyber security community, even though there are well-defined attacker and defender models.”

Unlike normal cyberattacks, where the threat actor aims to get partial control over the target system, game cheats are considered a type of Man-At-The-End (MATE) attack, where the attacker is the user with full access to the system and wants the attack to succeed rather than prevent it.