The Unerring Punkbuster...

[Delikon]

hoglund someone special?

yup
he founded rootkit.com and wrote a few nice books and has created a few of outstanding reverse engineering tools
HBGary

[Simmy]

Indeed catching all the baddies over at warlords place detecting all the detected hacks

and the good NON scammers over on the good side are undetected

[Pansemuckl]

Nice find. If rootkit.com considers PB to be a rootkit, what's left to say. PB going down the lavatory. nC doing its best.

[2ci stole my money]

You're either with us or against us
Written by jockyitch
Saturday, 05 April 2008

Editorial

Recently, Tony Ray (President of Even Balance) and I have shared a good deal of correspondence. The topic of conversation has revolved around the recent attacks on their online anti-cheat software PunkBuster (PB) by hackers.

The incident was described in this BASHandSlash article:

netCoders vs. PunkBuster
I thought the piece was fairly even-handed: we reported what happened and left it at that. No moralizing. We just told the story.

When I was doing research on the incident, I was expecting a lot of sympathy for Even Balance. After all, Tony Ray's group keeps telling us that they are the only defense between our current civilized gaming world and the barbarian-hackers at our gates. Who would want the barbarians to win? After all, civilization's great...it's brought us the scone and after-dinner mints, right?

But I did not find much in the way of sympathy at all.

On the contrary, to my surprise, some were even applauding the hackers for exposing PB as an intrusive piece of software that could, in the wrong hands, severely compromise personal privacy.
Why the anti-PB sentiment? Aside from some of the technical gaffs it has had to overcome, I think that you can point a finger to its lack of transparency and its heavy-handed PR (an abrasive superiority shown by management has not helped). I saw some of that when Tony Ray responded to the article above. I printed his response in this second article:

Even Balance President Responds

In his accompanying email, Tony seemed to be especially ticked at BASHandSlash and took the high moral ground with me. I think he felt I stepped over the line by publishing the URL of the cheat coders. Perhaps that was a sentiment many readers felt as well - but Tony was the only one to mention it. In addition, I'm sure he felt that publicizing this attack on PB was an attack on his company. It wasn't meant that way...but I felt he thought it was. He said his peace quite well, in the following statement to me:

I'm not saying you were coming across as partisan - I guess we just don't much like to see legitimate sites giving credibility to cheat sites by quoting them directly and naming their site. We know that any exposure a cheat site gets by name is going to be bad for the community in the long run. That's why most legit sites/forums won't allow cheat sites to be mentioned by name.

I wanted to clarify for you our position on some bad inferences because you recently posted an interview with one of our staff and I would hate to see confusion caused for regular players, admins, leagues, etc. We have always taken the approach of documenting our false positives after the situation has been analyzed and addressed. We've messed up before and I'm sure we will again - hey we're humans on the cutting edge of dealing with nefarious individuals and groups and we have to write/deploy new code all the time - mistakes will be made. Spreading the details (especially the punk's version) and letting the cheat/hack authors have their day in the limelight is not (in our opinion) best for the community. I'm not trying to preach or sound harsh here, I'm just being forthright. You can do whatever you want with your site obviously - it's just that over time there is little room for gray areas, a site is either pro-cheat or it isn't, the two viewpoints don't mix.

-Tony

Though he is still abrasive towards the hackers (he continues to call the cheat-coders out there, "punks")...I will give Mr. Ray a great deal of credit for his humility in his statement. I do not think I can remember him saying the words "We've messed up", before. I think that is a good thing as it makes him and his company more sympathetic to us average gamers - and less likely to think that they are up to evil things with their intrusive software.

There have been many gamers out there that complain that Even Balance never acknowledges mistakes. Well here is proof that they do (at least in this case).

As for his shot across BASHandSlash's bows...here was my email to him in response:

Tony,

When I started playing online, I was constantly falling victim to hackers and config tweakers. It was that experience that made me put a site together that attempts to explain to the average person what is actually going on out there...the good the bad and the ugly. In this way, typical gamers can arm themselves with knowledge and protect themselves from abuse.

As BASHandSlash being "legit/not-legit":

You probably have judged me from the one article I have done on this issue. And that's fine - I get what I deserve.

My actions on certain issues do tend to confuse old-school gamers because I sometimes break from the black/white paradigm that has been the norm in the gaming community. I am of the belief that the more people know what is going on, the better things will be in the long term. I think that knowledge allows gamers to think for themselves and be aware of the world around them. Knowledge can also be an agent for positive change.

In the end, the bad guys have this data - the good guys don't - a philosophy that Leo Laporte (renowned technology expert) expounds. He is of the opinion that there are more good guys than bad...so in the end it's best everyone become educated.

The Elephant in the Room:

Let me just say that without PB, no one would be playing my favorite online game: CoD. You guys do a great job keeping us playing in a hack-free environment. You should obviously be commended for this. I for one applaud all your tireless efforts in this regard.

However, with all due respect, sometimes your company gets bad press because it puts on airs of triumphalism and has a tendency to be less than transparent.

As an example, PB placed two persistent, intrusive processes running on my machine, PnkBstrA and PnkBstrB, and did not tell me about them. At best, this practice could be viewed as rude but necessary - at worse, it was dismissive of your customers and could even be construed as an example of malware.

Speaking of gray areas...there's one for you.

Sincerely,

Jock.

I appreciate the statements Mr. Ray has made this past week in an effort at damage-control. I'm comforted by what he had to say, and my faith in PB has been restored somewhat.

However, I would have been more comforted if he had yet again addressed the issues of privacy with the software and for that matter I would have incredibly grateful if he could have told us he was rolling out more technical resources to sustain his product. After all...it has been three months since since PB has been kicking players in CoD2 over packet-loss - and I have yet to hear anyone mention a solution.

BASHandSlash.com - You're either with us or against us

[dudewtfhax]

I actually just read that. My view on PB still doesn't change

[seedat0r]

Originally Posted by Tony Ray

We've messed up before and I'm sure we will again - hey we're humans on the cutting edge of dealing with nefarious individuals and groups and we have to write/deploy new code all the time - mistakes will be made.

A mistake like that must not be made ever by a company making money out of this.
This new code you deployed and used for months now reflects your stupidity and arrogance at its best.
Next time you come up with some "brilliant" idea ensure that you actually think about it before starting to code.

[CAW]

vsay cheer "^7|^5PBBHub^7| Player ^2Tony Ray ^3(f480ac22) ^7banned for ^1beeing a noob [^5#13023^1]"

put it in .cfg file, and ingame, exec it havefun

[joey]

Is this still working because i cant seem to get it working for cod4.

[majeran]

Nope.. there was pb update, pb doesnt kick for this anymore :/

[seedat0r]

Still being logged to master server...

[Pansemuckl]

Number of (new) signatures have decreased dramatically after the incident. Im curious to see with what PB comes up next.

[drakester]

What do you meant by this panse?
So far no kicks are active other then, public hacks.

[Invision]

I think he means that Punkbuster have not added bew signatures to log/kick for after the "Incident"

[maZZaDuDe]

PB can do whatever they want they just understand that they got owned by nC and they are only some nice decoration for us or someone to fool...

[Idolize .]

Nope, they are our enemys. Without them would be hacking no fun.

[FiVe]

Please keep in mind that without PunkBuster, netCoders wouldn't be what it is today. Would who buy undetected private hacks, if there's no anti-cheat? Everyone could simply use public hacks all the time, and the vendors here would not make any money.

Sure, netCoders would be a site that distributes public hacks, but everyone would use them then, and no one would make any money out of it. There would be no leagues, since no one can be trusted, and cheating would be as common as an edited user interface.

Eventhough we keep burning PB to the ground, we need PB to keep nC up and running.

The one way for PunkBuster to destroy nC, is to stop detecting public hacks. However, doing so and PB will also destroy itself. A sacrifice they will not attempt to make.

[0o0o0o0o0]

anti cheats aren't the only way to detect cheaters, in fact most league bans are from demos either by watching them with cheats on or review of console commands rather then the "anti cheat" systems since most people realize that no game is "hack proof"

[dudewtfhax]

Originally Posted by 0o0o0o0o0

anti cheats aren't the only way to detect cheaters, in fact most league bans are from demos either by watching them with cheats on or review of console commands rather then the "anti cheat" systems since most people realize that no game is "hack proof"

Ok obviously you've never used a nC cheat and know nothing about cheating. nC cheats are demo proof and the cheat cvars are hidden. Only way you can detect in demos is if someone turns it up. Which obviously they dont care if they're caught.

[mcfc4life]

Originally Posted by dudewtfhax

Ok obviously you've never used a nC cheat and know nothing about cheating. nC cheats are demo proof and the cheat cvars are hidden. Only way you can detect in demos is if someone turns it up. Which obviously they dont care if they're caught.

everyone will always make a mistake once, and that once they ask for demo

[sharpeee]

You can be dodgy, and not hack. As long as you dont make it blatent like aiming thru the wall, you should be fine..

[Auld Smoking Man]

The only way any-one ever gets caught is because of STUPITITY,now open wide tony

[dudewtfhax]

Originally Posted by Auld Smoking Man

The only way any-one ever gets caught is because of STUPITITY,now open wide tony

Not really since I usually turn it up and don't care if they demo me I'll just change info when getting off server and then the info they ban is already old dunno if thats exactly stupidity. I think only some get caught for that not all.