Valve monitoring you?

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Droigan

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So according to this Valve is monitoring your DNS cache in order to catch cheaters with the byproduct of also collecting your entire browser history

VAC now reads all the domains you have visited and sends it back to their servers hashed : GlobalOffensive

Decompiled module:http://i.imgur.com/z9dppCk.png

What it does:

Goes through all your DNS Cache entries (ipconfig /displaydns)

Hashes each one with md5

Reports back to VAC Servers

So the domain reddit.com would be 1fd7de7da0fce4963f775a5fdb894db5 or organner.pl would be 107cad71e7442611aa633818de5f2930 (Although this might not be fully correct because it seems to be doing something to characters between A-Z, possible making them lowercase)

Hashing with md5 is not full proof, they can be reversed easily nowadays using rainbowtables. So they are relying on a weak hashing function

You dont have to visit the site, any query to the site (an image, a redirect link, a file on the server) will be added to the dns cache. And only the domain will be in your cache, no full urls. Entries in the cache remains till they expire or at most 1 day (might not be 100% accurate), but they dont last forever.

We don't know how long this information is kept on their servers, maybe forever, maybe a few days. It's probably done everytime you join a vac server. It seems they are moving from detecting the cheats themselves to computer forensics. Relying on leftover data from using the cheats. This has been done by other anticheats, like punkbuster and resulted in false bans. Although im not saying they will ban people from simply visiting the site, just that it can be easily exploited

Original thread removed, reposted as self text (eNzyy: Hey, please could you present the information in a self post rather than linking to a hacking site. Thanks)

EDIT1: To replicate this yourself, you will have to dump the vac modules from the game. Vac modules are streamed from vac servers and attach themselves to either steamservice.exe or steam.exe (not sure which one). Once you dump it, you can load the dll into ida and decompile it yourself, then reverse it to find the winapi calls it is using and come to the conclusion yourself. There might be software/code out there to dump vac modules. But its not an easy task. And on a final note, you shouldn't trust anyone with your data, even if its valve. At the very least they should have a clear privacy policy for vac.
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Tried to look to the thread to find any verification that they are actually sending information back to Valve, and only came up with this

http://i.imgur.com/J681m2v.pngThere you go, verified they are in fact collecting.

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[?]hiver [score hidden] 28 minutes ago

What am I looking at?

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[?]frankster [score hidden] 16 minutes ago

No evidence they are sending back to the servers though right?

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[?]codeusasoft [score hidden] 11 minutes ago

DnSGetCacheDataTable sends it back.
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But I am not sure what that means, as I have no idea what I am looking at there.

This is a big wtf if true though.
 
Tuco

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If there's one company I don't mind looking at all the websites I visit it'd probably be Valve.
 
meStevo

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Heh, if MS or EA did this there'd be riots in the streets.
 
Zaphid

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Tuco_sl said:
If there's one company I don't mind looking at all the websites I visit it'd probably be Valve.
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That's very dangerous slippery slope

I believe the best model for policing multiplayer FPS are dedicated servers with their admins doing the banning
 
D

Droigan

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If you discovered that your girlfriend of many years that you had no issues with had secretly monitored your cell phone to see where you went all the time to make sure you weren't cheating, would you have issues? Or if you monitored her, you think she would have issues?

If so, would think issues would arise from having corporations doing the same with our digital persons.

If this was reversed, and a hacker went into Valve and monitored the workers web browsing history, I think it would end up as news sort of like this.

Evil hacker caused tons of damage invading the privacy rights of the Corporation Valve! Valve reports "damages" of millions and distressed workers! Federal authorities were put on the case and tracked the hacker down. A SWAT team raid on the hackers house found lots of personal information history regarding the workers at Valve. Authorities are working with the corporation to make sure that laws are made to insure the safety of the companies, along with safeguards being implemented to monitor all users of the site to make sure that nobody can do so undetected again. "Anonymity is becoming an increasing problem online" said X politician. He went on to say "We are working on a bill to make proxies and hiding who you are illegal, because if you are not doing anything, why do you need privacy?" We will update on any further news regarding the terrible thing that happened to Valve, but for now it seems they are on the case and fixing this so it won't happen again! We shall all be safe soon!"

UPDATED: An interview with Gabe, the leader of Valve now states that "I can confirm that due to the leaked information Half Life 3 is canceled. We do not take lightly on spying on us, and if you want to blame anyone for this, blame the hacker who violated our privacy".
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Corporations doing the same to people, who cares? That's just business as usual.
 
Tuco

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Zaphid_sl said:
That's very dangerous slippery slope

I believe the best model for policing multiplayer FPS are dedicated servers with their admins doing the banning
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I don't believe in slippery slope arguments. I do agree that dedicated servers with admins (Or a clan running a server and most of the people in the clan having mod privs) is the best way.

Droigan_sl said:
If you discovered that your girlfriend of many years that you had no issues with had secretly monitored your cell phone to see where you went all the time to make sure you weren't cheating, would you have issues? Or if you monitored her, you think she would have issues?

If so, would think issues would arise from having corporations doing the same with our digital persons.

If this was reversed, and a hacker went into Valve and monitored the workers web browsing history, I think it would end up as news sort of like this.



Corporations doing the same to people, who cares? That's just business as usual.
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I don't believe in false equivalence arguments, but I do agree that them storing all the websites you visit could be a privacy and security risk. If they got a hold of my encrypted password and my security question and then got a hold of all the sites I log into they could do some harm.
 
Vorph

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Valve shouldn't be given a pass on this because of Steam, and they've definitely crossed a line here.

That said, VAC and Steam are two entirely different things, and I don't have any games that use VAC because there isn't a public-server MP game that I give one single fuck about, so I won't be joining the rioters myself.
 
Mist

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Warden sent back all the window titles of all your running applications.
 
S

Sean_sl

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That's some pretty scumbag shit regardless of who does it. I don't have anything to hide, but I'm pretty fucking tired of crap like this.

Digital goods companies justdon't fucking respect anyone's privacy at all. The crap where every game now tracks everything you do and sends it back to the company for feedback so that they can mold future games around that stuff is just as bad as this kind of thing too. Targeting advertising, demographics tracking, focus group testing, and all of that nonsense just sickens me.
 
Mist

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He's got no proof that it actually sends it to Valve. It wouldn't make sense to send that much data, there's probably a small list that gets sent down to the client, then it checks against that list, and sends a flag back if there was a match between the two.
 
Quineloe

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Tuco_sl said:
I don't believe in slippery slope arguments. I do agree that dedicated servers with admins (Or a clan running a server and most of the people in the clan having mod privs) is the best way.


I don't believe in false equivalence arguments, but I do agree that them storing all the websites you visit could be a privacy and security risk. If they got a hold of my encrypted password and my security question and then got a hold of all the sites I log into they could do some harm.
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The problem isn't that valve has that data (if that really doesn't concern you), the problem is that this data exists now and can be stolen or seized. See Operation Spade and Azov Films for current real life examples. Or for a different example, no one in the Netherlands minded that the government kept the confession of people on file along with their addresses, because the NL Government was run by good people who could be trusted. Until the Nazis basically found google maps for jews in Amsterdam when they took the country.
 
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Zuuljin

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Mist_sl said:
He's got no proof that it actually sends it to Valve. It wouldn't make sense to send that much data, there's probably a small list that gets sent down to the client, then it checks against that list, and sends a flag back if there was a match between the two.
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I would guess this. There's no reason to constantly have everyone send data to valve for verification if they can just push the flagged sites to all users and simply check locally for a match.
 
Xalara

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Zuuljin_sl said:
I would guess this. There's no reason to constantly have everyone send data to valve for verification if they can just push the flagged sites to all users and simply check locally for a match.
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The reason to send all data to Valve would be so that hackers can't reverse engineer the detection logic. Plus it's really not all that hard or expensive in the age of cloud computing to just collect all the data and go through it later with something like Hadoop.
 
bixxby

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Quineloe_sl said:
The problem isn't that valve has that data (if that really doesn't concern you), the problem is that this data exists now and can be stolen or seized. See Operation Spade and Azov Films for current real life examples. Or for a different example, no one in the Netherlands minded that the government kept the confession of people on file along with their addresses, because the NL Government was run by good people who could be trusted. Until the Nazis basically found google maps for jews in Amsterdam when they took the country.
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Confessions for what? How did that lead to google maps of jews? (Very interesting)
 
T

Tenks

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Zuuljin_sl said:
I would guess this. There's no reason to constantly have everyone send data to valve for verification if they can just push the flagged sites to all users and simply check locally for a match.
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I think you underestimate how valuable information like this is to companies. Especially large companies like Valve. If they knew that 85% of their CS:GO playerbase visits csGoPlayers.com (or some shit) then it would make sense to reach out to this web site and see how Valve can engage them to maximize their mutual profits. The amount of data being harvested in the modern era is absolutely mind boggling to most people and we how have the tools thanks to MapReduce and BigTable to effectively make sense all this data. A few years ago harvesting all your history would be silly because you couldn't do anything with that much data. But those days have passed. This is very valuable data for a company to get.
 
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