What is Cheating ?

There are different types of cheats available for Counter-Strike, how they operate and how to tell when they are being used. While many single hacks may differ, they are always relatively simple, these simple hacks are however often combined into so called "multihacks" which usually include an aimbot, a wallhack and other features packaged in one handy executable.

Some of these cheats are freely downloadable from a website, sometimes even advertised by the cheat in-game with or without the cheater noticing it. Other cheats are private, although often enhanced versions of public cheats, maintained to stay undetected by anti-cheats. Due to their nature, private cheats are not normally available to anti-cheat coders which makes it very hard for them to know how to detect them. Some public hacks are released but receive so little attention that they slip by the radar of anti-cheat authors and these public hacks become just as useful to cheaters as private cheats.

Examples of executable cheats

Wallhacks — Makes walls and sometimes entities semitransparent to allow the user to see through walls. ESP — Extrasensory Perception, or Expanded Perception, draws player’s hit-boxes and information such as status, class, names, health and current weapon on the screen or make them more audible, allowing the cheater to see through walls. Spiked models — Long 'spikes', visible through walls, announce the presence of another player on the computer of a cheater

Usually, wallhack users can eventually give themselves away by acting illogically when viewed naturally, but very straightforward when observed with a wallhack. Additionally, certain effects of being able to see through walls, such as pre-aim that seems almost indistinguishable from an aimbot, can be detected server-side. Wallhacks and other similar cheats which use visual cues are impossible to hide when playing over a LAN where other players can see the cheater’s monitor.

Aimbots

Aimbots use the computer’s accurate knowledge of the enemy’s figure and aligns, and shoots automatically. Aimbots usually aim at the head, but some hacks have adjustable vectors to aim at different parts of the enemy body. Some have randomizing algorithms intended to make the identification of an aimbot user harder by spectators observing the player. In their most basic form, aimbots facilitate hitting the enemy player more accurately. However, that is where the similarities stop.

XQZ’s early, relatively primitive aimbot would be bound to a button on the keyboard or a mouse, and as long as the button was pressed, the aimbot would take care of properly aligning the crosshair on the head (or if necessary, a different body part). This button could be the same button as the fire button and thus could enable the aimbot to only aim while firing. But this gave away its presence to an alert observer by its tendency to "slave" (the all-too-proper, inhuman following of the motion of an enemy player). Early OGC’s aimbot portion was already much more advanced, and could be configured in a variety of ways. Auto-aiming allowed automated proper aiming and slaving. Auto-shot was another feature, where the bot would automatically cause the player avatar to fire their weapon if the aimbot locked up. It could be configured freely with an aimbot FOV (field of view). XQZ style aiming could also be employed. Later versions of OGC’s aimbot portion allowed for punctual aiming, where one hit of a button (commonly the fire button) would merely result in one single adjustment of aim, without any form of "slaving". Modern, so called "LAN-Proof" cheats implement what is called charged aiming which is yet another improvement over punctual aiming. Punctual aiming mode is only active (charged) when a specific button is pressed shortly before the aiming is needed, and firing in turn empties this charge. While this may be inconvenient, it allows anyone at a tournament to briefly check the suspected cheater’s game for any inconsistencies, only to find nothing. Some highly advanced and private aimbots do not even bother to move the crosshair as they are proxies and work on the network level. While essentially charged aimbots with a small FOV, the hits appear to be the result of an overabundance of luck rather than anything magically moving the crosshair. The advantage of this is to make nospread (see below) cheats less obvious and thus increase the effectiveness of them while only minimally affecting stealth. However, this stealth would only be effective client side, as a proxy must inform the server of crosshair movement in order to function properly. This behavior makes proxy aimbotting more suited to LAN parties, but is rather impractical. It is easier to make an aimbot that does not show aimbotting behavior client side than one that does, using only a standard client hook.

No-Recoil and no-spread

Essentially the same thing, no-recoil and no-spread attempt to reduce the inaccuracy of weapons when firing. No recoil describes the automated compensation of recoil on the vertical axis, while no spread tries to compensate for a server generated random bullet spread, which is not exclusively vertical or horizontal. As the recoil and spread of gunfire in Counter-Strike is pseudo-random, it can be reverse-engineered and predicted, allowing a cheat to compensate for inaccuracy.

The different names for no recoil and no-spread are mostly historical. No-recoil is much older and could be performed by protohacks - all that was necessary was to move the aiming reticle downwards in a distinctive way to accommodate for the vertical recoil of the weapons. No spread is by comparison, a relatively recent invention that can accurately predict the deviation and compensate for any inaccuracy, making all bullets hit exactly the same spot.

While both variants can be used independently, some older, slaving aimbots make the use of at least a no-recoil cheat a necessity, thus effectively making them part of the aimbot itself. Even with modern, punctual/charged aimbots it is very common to utilize no-spread if stealth isn't as important as performance. More stealthy, chargeable aimbots usually link the spread-suppressing factor to the charge and state of the aimbot. This prevents any stray, unaimed shots at a wall from giving away the presence of a no-spread cheat. They may also only remove the spread from the first 3-5 shots, or even only the first two bullets fired from a gun.

Speedhacks

Speedhacks change the computer’s perception of time and lets the cheater act extraordinarily fast. Most of the time they are found in combination with other cheats. Speedhacks can offer high time rates to clean out maps within seconds, or very slightly increased time rates to subtly improve the performance of an aimbot. Any client with a speed hack installed will find that their in-game movement and weapon rate-of-fire are far faster than other players. Like no-recoil, a timehack (or speedhack) is most often used in combination with an aimbot. Depending on the rate of time acceleration, a timehack can be used to rush to the enemy team’s spawn point and kill all enemy players within the first seconds of a round, or it can be used with a very low time acceleration (e.g. a rate of 1.1 or 1.2) to improve total damage over time of weapons. A timehack with a low time acceleration can also be used to reduce the time required to reload weapons.

While timehacks are often disabled when stealth is paramount, in laggy Internet play, very small accelerations are near impossible to detect without dedicated timing or software.

Ghosting

Ghosting is a different form of cheating which does not use an executable file to give a player an advantage. Instead, ghosting relies on the use of friends to help give away the position of enemies. Normally, dead players can only communicate with other dead players, but popular communication programs such as Ventrillo allow dead teammates to 'squeal' and help their fellow teammate to make the best decisions for survival. Sometimes a server may have "sv_alltalk" option on, allowing dead players to communicate with living ones. Although this may not be the most reliable way to cheat, it can give a player an advantage, as they know where their opponents are hiding. Ghosting is sometimes confused with using wall-hacks, as they have similar functions in giving away an enemy's position.



thanks to wikipedia.org