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    Read This BEFORE You Get Banned

    We would like to make everyone aware of a recent development related to Punkbuster.

    Synopsis: If you run chat programs such as IRC, Instant messaging including XFire while gaming, you need to take security measures or DO NOT RUN THEM AT ALL. People are sending or downloading files to people OVER those programs while you are playing.

    Example: The prankster sends you a file with a command to execute an Aimbot program. You don't have aimbot? IT DOESN'T MATTER whether you do or don't. Punkbuster is scanning your memory and sees aimbot files and commands and will BAN you.


    Please remember that these are PB bans, NOT Cain's Lair bans. If you get banned there is nothing we can do. You will need to appeal the ban to Punkbuster directly.


    This is the official public announcement by Punkbuster:

    March 25, 2008

    We rarely announce anything regarding commercial cheats and hacks. However, we are aware of the numerous "You Tube" type videos and posts on various sites where hackers who sell cheats make claims that are false but sound believable about PunkBuster and hack detection status. We receive numerous emails daily by concerned honest players regarding advertisements for undetectable hacks, etc. The truth is that via recent enhancements to PunkBuster's detection capabilities, we have cracked down hard on cheaters who pay for hacks in the games we support. Some commercial cheat sites have closed down due to our new methods and others have private forums where punks routinely complain about getting caught with the "undetectable" hacks, demanding refunds, etc. We have always maintained a strict policy of not giving money to punks, but thanks to community volunteer moles who have helped us obtain access to private hacks via donations of their time, etc., PunkBuster has been catching hacks from virtually all commercial cheat sites in recent weeks and months.

    One of the recent enhancements involves our memory scanner which aggressively scans for patterns included in known cheats (public and private). A commercial hack site where we have had recent success catching their subscribers has recently staged a few demonstrations of inserting text-based patterns via certain chat-related systems such as IRC, Instant Messaging, etc. directly into the memory of computers. These are specific text patterns that we have deployed in some supported games in the recent past. It is clear that many of the demonstrators are cheat-supporters willingly participating in the demonstration, but there is evidence that some innocent players had PunkBuster violations triggered during the past few days by the hackers who sent specific text patterns into the chat programs that were open during gameplay. We are removing these text based patterns from our system and encourage admins to not ban for PB violations that occurred during the past few days.

    Online gamers who play with other programs running should always enable security features in their messaging and chat programs to deny auto-download of files and only accept downloads from people they know and trust. As always, from PunkBuster's standpoint, if a known cheat pattern is in the memory of the computer during gameplay, then a violation will be triggered. We have always suggested closing other programs while you are playing multiplayer games on PunkBuster servers and that remains the safest policy. Leagues that require chat room usage for competitive play should take steps to ensure that only league participants have access and suspicious activity should be reported to us when there are concerns about manipulating the system.

    http://www.evenbalance.com/

    #2
    Well, Don't have Xfire atm... and the only program I run while playing is Vent. So unless the people I know quite well wanna burn me. I tink that I is safe.

    Very good post

    Comment


      #3
      Well I am saying that crap works...as that is what I have fallen into, running X-Fire in the back ground and bam, says I have a multi hack, many of you have spec'd me and know I dont. So now I am fighting with EB/ PB to get this removed. Embarassing and frustrating.

      Comment


        #4
        I've recently discovered that i can chat on my laptop and game on my desktop at the same time so I have no worries about this.

        Seriously this seems like a little bit of overkill to me. But don't most chat programs have a safeguard where you have to accept files from somebody before they run?

        Comment


          #5
          Dont know, only got X-fire for quick connect to games that have fav servers or people I knew
          but with an executable, i would think it wouldnt matter.

          Comment


            #6
            If you use them to connect I would exit them as soon as the game starts to load. Remember, Alt Tab can be your friend.
            Apache

            Where do you put the Bayonet?
            Chesty Puller (upon seeing a flamethrower for the first time)
            I am all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Lets start with typewriters.
            Frank Lloyd Wright

            Comment


              #7
              i run xfire while i play, but i dont text chat while im gaming, only before i play i do, sometime i use the xfire voice to talk while in-game that's about it. plus i dont download anything from xfire, except with friends that i know. so hopefully nothing would happen.
              Hit 'em like comic books, kaboom! pow pow!

              Comment


                #8
                Yea yea Apache..
                But I really didnt think dorkwads would go so far as to try some retarded, "asshatting" as this.

                Comment


                  #9
                  HEY Ladies and Gentlemen. I would like to add to what Black Arrow is gearing towards with this thread. BF2 is not the only game which THOUSANDS have been banned from. From what I'm reading, there have been as many if not more people banned from COD4 as there have from BF2. EVERY punkbuster enabled game is subject to the possibility of this exploit. The people behind this are doing it because they are hoping that EVERYONE will be unbanned and have a clean slate. (DELETE THIS INFO IF IT IS DEEMED INAPPROPRIATE but I thought my friends might find this useful information)

                  And I quote

                  Now how did we manage to do that? Quite easy... Punkbuster - desperate to get our private cheats detected, thought it might be a good idea to randomly sniff any PC's physical (!!!) memory. Basically it's acting like a virus-scanner trying to find blacklisted sequences of bytes found in cheat files. Which is not even a bad idea - it's just been used badly. Give a monkey a gun and he shoots himself. Don't blame the gun...

                  First of all I was surprised to find my private chat aswell as passwords (paypal/online banking/...) just everything inside PnkBstrB's process memory. Thanks to (name removed) for pointing me to this.

                  Do you know what PB is doing with that data? Do you trust them? Of couse you do. Punkbuster never fails. I don't trust them. So I kept digging deeper. After a while I found out what rsHook got detected for: Some noob leaked the files to Punkbuster. As they couldn't manage to reverse or crack them, they've just added some random string to their signature blacklist.

                  Neither (name removed) nor I could believe what's happening here. All it takes to get kicked is to have that sequences of bytes in a computer's memory, and you will get kicked for #80332, even without hacks!!! That exploit ... no let's call it by it's real name

                  Large Stoopidness of evenbalance:

                  was asking to be exploited. As such we started looking into almost any Punkbuster game and found similar strings. Of course we could not resist to try this on a couple of servers and different games - with surprising results: We were able to kick players from almost any Punkbuster game for different violations.

                  Where's Punkbuster's defensive attitude here? To yield to despair? If those signature violations you people over in Texas made such a blown-up secret about (#Gamehack, #Multihack, #Aimbot) would be handled with precaution, just like the Corrupted Memory (fried RAM VS memory patch), thousands and thousands of CDKEYs wouldn't be banned and wasted for now!

                  In other words: YOUR FALSE POSITIVES already caused thousands of innocent people to be banned! Just imagine how many cdkeys have been wasted on Call of Duty 4 already because of that bug? Well alot of keys went down the lavatory eversince we found out, that's for sure

                  There's more but I don't have the time nor patience to proofread and remove certain things which would make the information illegible anyway.

                  You get the idea of the B.S. that is going on. While some of the things pointed out may or may not be true, still doesn't justify the tarnished reputation of the thousands of innocent victims.

                  Until next time, you saw it here, first.

                  ~~mike~~

                  Comment


                    #10
                    You have just got to love the "Holier than thou" attitude.
                    A change of Pace.
                    "All the fun of a clan without the BS" - Cain

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Took the words right outta my mouth Pace...so before they start calling me a Sniveling brat for yelling at them about being "busted", they need to take a look at what it actually was that tripped their trigger. I'm a 33 year old dude, wtf do i need with a hack/ aimbot..ya'all have specced me and know better. Again, I am embarassed about this but maybe when they pull their heads outta their ass things might be better. So those that think..yea, he was cheating...think again.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Sorry to hear that you got caught up in that mess. Here is an image that may help others understand how NOT to get banned. (I don't see anything in it that really needs to be edited out for any particular reason, if so feel free)



                        Another string has been circulated which results in people being kicked for '(MULTIHACK) #70476'. It's likely that there's an endless amount of strings which will result in people being banned for all kinds of reasons.
                        And then here's some more information:





                        WARNING: If you try to research this and you have a WEBPAGE OPEN that contains the strings, you will be banned as the strings will be detected in Physical Memory by punkbuster specifically pnkbstrA-B.exe.

                        Anyways I'm off to bed. I am still trying to find out if there are plans for unbanning EVERYONE, or how they are going to handle this. I'll keep posting as I/we find out more information.

                        G'night.

                        ~~mike~~

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Woah i had no idea stuff went that deep i thought it just we feel something wrong in the code ofthe server and ban 'em

                          Comment


                            #14
                            The End Of All Internet Gamings Is Near!!!
                            [img]http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/120/latinsigsj0.jpg[/img] [img]http://sigs.2142-stats.com/BenKenobi_player_7511.png[/img] [img]http://www.ronpaul2008.com/img/public_banners/hope-banner1.gif[/img] [url=http://www.cainslair.com/paypal2Cain.htm/]
                            You will donate to Cain's. Now.[/url]

                            Comment

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