‘Dota 2’ bans 40,000 cheaters by using their own hacks against them

Dota 2 developer Valve has announced that it permanently banned 40,000 cheaters in one day, thanks to a successful “honeypot” that only affected hackers.

Valve shared the impressive figure yesterday (February 21), and explained that several weeks ago it issued a patch that did not affect legitimate players but instead targeted players using a third-party cheat to gain unfair advantages.

With the patch, Valve introduced “a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay,” but would be read and accessed by third-party cheat software. According to Valve, all 40,000 accounts that were banned accessed “this ‘secret’ area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.”

“The prevalence of this family of cheats means that today’s ban wave is particularly large, but it’s only the latest action in an ongoing campaign,” Valve continued.

“While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible, and use it to make our position clear: If you are running any application that reads data from the Dota client as you’re playing games, your account can be permanently banned from playing Dota. This includes professional players, who will be banned from all Valve competitive events.”

In the past, Valve has rarely shied away from punishing pro players for breaking Dota 2‘s rules. Several months ago a number of competitors were banned for account sharing (thanks, Dot Esports) and in May 2022, a Russian esports team was disqualified for drawing a controversial symbol on the minimap.

“Dota is a game best enjoyed when played on an even field, where victories are earned by skill and tenacity,” Valve added. “We expect that some players will continue to develop and use new exploits, to continue to try to gain unfair advantages at the expense of other players. As before, we will continue to detect and remove these exploits as they come, and continue to ban users who cheat.”

In other gaming news, Blizzard Entertainment has shared a new video exploring the world of Sanctuary in Diablo 4.