November 29th, 2010 
godmin What are Hacks, how do they work and how do games get protected?
Ever since there were computer games, there were also people trying to manipulate them in order to get an advantage. Particularly in only games hacking versus human players became a very serious problem. Therefore publisher and game developers started fighting forbidden cheats. Anti-cheat software as for example Valve’s VAC or Blizzard’s Warden are quite powerful in detecting hacks. Even though developers could fix bugs, exploits and security holes to make hacking impossible, they rather go with another way: they ban hackers. Usually hackers get banned after a few weeks/months so that they already like the game and re-buy it( = more profit for publishers).
How does a maphack work?
Well, in Warcraft 3 games there is no real client-server behavior, because every player’s computer has all game information at all time. So your computer already knows where enemy heroes are, it just adds the fog so you can not see them. A maphack simply manipulates Warcraft and tells it to just not add the fog to the map. Voilà – you see enemies.
Blizzard’s Warden detects cheaters/hackers in both Battle.net and custom games. But if you somehow loose connection to Blizzard’s server, Warden can not scan you anymore, but you are still in the custom game and may start your maphacks without any danger! (To close connection the Blizzard you can use DropBnet)
In Heroes of Newerth (HoN) maphacking is impossible. All games in HoN are hosted on the publisher’s servers and every player gets only the game-information he really needs. If an enemy hero is under fog, the server will not send you it’s position and no maphack could make him visible.
Care: If anybody offers you a HoN maphack, it is probably a virus, trojan or keylogger!
However, it is quite expensive for publishers to host all games on own servers like HoN does, therefore that will probably not become established in other games.
At the moment we can only speculate about Dota 2. With a probability bordering on certainty we can say that Dota 2 is going to run in Steam using Valves Anti Cheat(VAC). VAC is a very smart and powerful anti-cheat software that has been developing for many years. It is connected with Steam and as soon as you drop connection to VAC – what already quite hard – you instantly drop out of Steam and the game. In addition to that new maphacks will be detected by VAC quite fast and you get banned a few weeks later.
