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.
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.