The cheat was allegedly injected into the game through an exploit in a custom map which you could download through steam.
There have been cases of people smuggling aimbots in onboard mice drivers. There was also a Steam oversight where hacks could be loaded via the workshop feature. A semi-pro German player was caught in 2015 I believe.
The german guy who was caught was saying a lot of these things which obviously weren't true, like claiming that a lot of other players in top teams were cheating on LAN, but in hindsight that hardly seems believable.
A driver cheat which would auto-inject code on insertion would as far as I know require a 0-day exploit on Windows, and I have a hard time believing one of the cheat devs was sitting on one of those.
I mean, there were 3 pro players banned in like a week. I doubt this was coincidence [1].
> A driver cheat which would auto-inject code on insertion would as far as I know require a 0-day exploit on Windows, and I have a hard time believing one of the cheat makers was sitting on one of those
It's not completely out of the question. Check out this DEF CON hack which illustrates something similar[2].
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/csgo-competitive-scene-embroiled-in-...
[2] https://theoutline.com/post/2032/how-to-hack-a-mouse-to-win-...
Out of sf, KQLY and Emilio, it does seem likely that both sf and Emilio would cheat online in order to qualify, but KQLY whose team almost always passed online qualifiers? I have no idea.
If I recall correctly, Emilio was banned months prior to the others though, and he hardly played any major LANs. sf and KQLY were using the same cheat, but there's nothing which makes it seem like it happened on LANs.
Either way, it's impossible to say what happened years ago, but if it did happen, I doubt it kept happening.
Nowadays there's definitely a market for it. eSports is turning in to a multi-billion dollar industry.
0day's can be cheap enough for the type of people willing to risk five figures on CSGO betting, etc.
> I'm curious why you say this. I'm a machine learning noob, but it seems pretty straightforward that it would work. Relating to wallhacks, they can use your last say 1,000 matches, and if you're never/rarely surprised by a camping enemy, you're probably cheating.
Exactly. And not just that, wouldn't ML in theory also be able to detect subtle reactions to changes that the player shouldn't see? For example if a cheater has a map hack that only shows dots on the minimap, and does some small action like twitch with the mouse when an enemy he's following and can't see or hear ingame, changes direction?