Gabe Defends VAC Privacy Intrusion, Cites Relationship Of Trust Between Valve And Customers

Gabe Newell took to Reddit to personally address concerns about Valve’s Anti-Cheat (VAC) System reading the domains their users visit. It addressed a particular ongoing cheat, and it was implemented in a brief amount of time.

First, we need to understand what the original allegations were. They came up in this Counter Strike: Global Offensives thread, where players found that the VAC was going through player’s DNS Cache entries, hashing them, and then reporting them back to VAC’s servers. This would be activated not only if you visited the site, but if you simply made any kind of query (meaning redirect links, images, server hosted files) towards the site. At the time, gamers did not know how long the information was kept.

Gabe has cleared up that they were seeking out cheat creators using DRM to make sure people paid for their kernel-level cheats. These cheats phone home to a DRM server, and so VAC went through user’s domains to find those servers, and used the DNS cache entry information they collected to double check.

As a result, Valve found and banned 570 cheaters. Gabe did not specify if this coincided with Reddit discovering VAC’s hack, but they confirmed that cheat creators wised up to Valve’s tactics quickly, so that they were only able to use it effectively for 13 days.  Of course, Gabe reassures VAC did not act beyond this scope.

Gabe went further, and talked about how Valve’s intentions were to make cheat creating prohibitively expensive to maintain. And he basically had a pep talk on how Valve’s relationship with its customers was founded on mutual trust.

The interesting thing is that a poster in the original thread figured it out exactly right, so this could have been interpreted as not out of the ordinary for Valve, or any company. It is also a reminder that even the most beloved of game companies need to make hard decisions and do things like these. In this somewhat limited sphere, do you think Valve was justified in taking these actions to go after cheaters, or would you have preferred more openness earlier on? Share your thoughts on the comments below.

Image is from Counter Strike: Global Offensives.