Dreams to provide some small help in regards to hackers for players/devs.

[Pichii]

During the initial launch of A20, the servers were hit by the typical hacker(s)
Except this time, I managed to pull some somewhat useful information...

The hackers are using Cheat Engine service and it is a paid-for service that is international and has their own servers.
The cheat client seems to be configured with an anti-tracert chicken script where once tracert makes it past the VPN, the Cheat Engine servers themselves bury the connection and drop the associated MAC/VPN.
This could potentially be used against them for others/the devs of 7d2d tho I am unsure how outside of dedi-servers just scripting tracerts for newly-logged IPs.

However- I can confirm via my past experiences; a tracert on the hacker that hit my server on my own PC appears to cause an auto-chicken script to trigger on their hacking tools back-end that will almost instantly disconnect them from the Cheat Engine VPN they are using to attack thereby disconnecting them from you.

 

[meganoth]

I'm not sure what the best place for this is, but Pimp Dream surely isn't. You could give that hint to server operators by posting it in the Multiplayer section.

Or contact a TFP dev directly or post the hint in the dev diary. I doubt though this can be used in any automatic defense system as the hackers would have lots of ways to react to this again. TFP obviously has not the manpower for an arms race with hackers.

 

[Pichii]

Id strongly disagree. I definately think it would be great to have a hacker-less game but do accept it isnt possible to arms race with hackers.
This is simple and easy to script and could easily be implemented, if yall chose. Sure, its circumventable like everything else in the world of hacking but if thats your opinion; why bother wasting RAM and other resources on EAC? ... Bit odd of a position to have considering you use anticheat software in the first place...
A script to tracert is simple, easily implemented and just like EAC might prevent a few hands from cheating sooooo...
Odd position to have.

 

[meganoth]

Id strongly disagree. I definately think it would be great to have a hacker-less game but do accept it isnt possible to arms race with hackers.
This is simple and easy to script and could easily be implemented, if yall chose. Sure, its circumventable like everything else in the world of hacking but if thats your opinion; why bother wasting RAM and other resources on EAC? ... Bit odd of a position to have considering you use anticheat software in the first place...
A script to tracert is simple, easily implemented and just like EAC might prevent a few hands from cheating sooooo...
Odd position to have.

I'm just another user of the forum, not a TFP employee, I don't speak for them.

I'm not saying that counter-measures like this would be useless, just that their usefullness is likely time-limited and I don't know if TFP has time for this when more important hacking fixes (IMHO) are needed in the network code. But as you say it isn't complicated so maybe I'm wrong on this.

And I'm saying that if you want an actual developer to see this, contact him directly, Pimp Dreams is not the right venue (I would try to contact Alloc, he seems to be involved in network code). No guarantee you'll get an answer though. The other route you could take is creating such a script and distributing it as a server tool so server operators can use it. It does not depend on TFP's help and may be available in a week whereas a TFP-implemented script could take much longer to reach servers and might not even be back-ported to A20.