Punkbuster Service Goes Down, Hundreds of Online Game Servers Affected

MojoKid writes "PunkBuster, the anti-cheating service implemented in hundreds of online games, is down. As of the time of writing, the official PunkBuster website is up and down, after having been completely down for the past couple of hours. On Twitter, there are numerous reports of gamers who've been unable to play online in the most popular PunkBuster-backed title of the moment, Battlefield 3. EA has gone as far as to post an interim fix. Applying the fix is a simple matter of extracting an archive and then overwriting a couple of files inside of your Battlefield 3 install folder. While EA has little power over PunkBuster's ability to get things 100% functional again, this issue does highlight the fact that third-party solutions are not always the way to go."

Comments

Have EA posted an interim fix?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "interim fix" link points to an unofficial site, and the download link on that site points to a file hosted on dropbox...

Re:Have EA posted an interim fix?

[Desler]

His point was that EA didn't post the fix. The link is to a third party website.

EA is a Third Party Software Company

[Jack9]

Almost everything in EA is third party. From matchmaking, to stats recording, to software clients, to servers. The fact you CAN fix an integral part of the game being down, speaks to why third party integration is preferred, not why it should be avoided. Thanks for the update anyway Mojokid.

punkbuster is worthless

[Anonymous Coward]

It was worthless in the quake 3 days, and it sure as hell hasn't gotten any better today.. It did little other than lag the clients/servers and kick/ban players spuriously.

Re:punkbuster is worthless

[Anti Cheat]

Sorry Requiem18th but you have no idea what you are talking about. You only think you know how PB worked. Hate to tell you but your blacklist idea was only a very tiny part.

  Impy the Impiuos Imp You are right. But it was far worse than you could ever imagine with cheat rootkits

I used to be involved in this area for over 15 yrs. One thing that is very common in cheating are cheats sold/subscribed to over the internet. Having over the years examined these pay cheats, that claim to get around PunkBuster (PB), I have a few insights to share. Many times eventually PB would nail them, counter to claims on the websites. Usually when the numbers using the cheat make it worthwhile for PB to go after.

But here is the very serious side these cheats most don't know.
It's no surprise in finding out the cheats are rootkits, but the surprise are the extra payloads they carry or will carry when they get updated in time. The thieves that write the cheats don't stop at stealing the fun out of the game. Several of the bigger sellers in the past were also serious criminals. It was very common for them to hijack your comp to be used in their private botnets or to rent out. The other common theft were your logins and passwords. Many parent were surprised to find their credit cards, banking info was compromised, but worst was identity theft. These cheat criminals often stole directly from the sucker, but more often would just sell your info to others. One German cheat writer thought he was really smart. Once the client (usually a kid) stopped subscribing to his cheat, that was when he loaded up the nasty payloads. He made more money of this theft method than the cheat subscriptions he sold. All those past customers were the gift that just kept on giving.

As for Punkbuster as a product. Once it matured as a product it did a decent job at catching cheats for a long time (I haven't followed this stuff recently). One thing for sure. Valve's VAC was the worst product by far. Valve would only catch a tiny portion of the cheats as compared to PB and VAC very rarely ever caught private cheats. VAC also had the worst error rate of false detection. Sorry to vac fans but those were the stats.
I don't do this work in the game industry anymore, but I don't think things have changed much in the last few years.

Re:LOL proprieturds

[LordLimecat]

Like slashdot?

Re:lol

[archen]

punkbuster does not stop anyone from cheating.

It seems to be stopping everyone from cheating at the moment.

In other news

[Krojack]

EA files DMCA lawsuits against thousands for modifying their game files to get around cheat protection...

Enemy Territory

[Seeteufel]

Does it affect Enemy Territory? Meine Leben!!!

Re:lol

[Requiem18th]

Agreed, punkbuster is an snake oil sales man. I'm usually against closed source software, and for essential tasks, I'm 100% against it. For non essential stuff like videogames it's somewhat okay. You can't make a game secure without end-to-end encryption.

You can get close enough by offucating the network protocol and periodically chaning it. You don't even need the source code for game itself to be closed, you just need encrypted, or really offuscated application code to hide an authentication key and that's it. What punkbuster does is trying to apply a band-aid to security by running a blacklist of strings over RAM. You can remotedly disconnect someone by sending them a message containing a blacklisted string for instance. How stupid is that? And of course Punkbuster needs administrator access for it so if punkbuster or any subprocess get compromised the intruder gets admin access to your system. And in the end punkbuster run in the client anyway, how do you know it hasn't been compromised?

Don't like it? don't buy it.

[sl4shd0rk]

Seems to me that if you don't agree with how the EA model works, then don't buy their games. Otherwise, you're just subsidizing the exact thing you hate.

Re:LOL proprieturds

[capnchicken]

Looks like it was last updated in '09, what's the over/under on that not being current with the production code?

Re:DNS fix worked for some

[dave562]

10-1 is not that unheard of. I went 13-2 last night on MoH:W and that is using the same engine as BF3. It really all comes down to latency. When I have the connection to myself, I do well. When my fiance is playing WoW on the other computer, I find myself doing less well. That has been my experience since the early days of online gaming. I was one of the best Q3 players in the world for a while when the game first came out. A little bit of it was skill, a lot of it was the 384k DSL line and 10ms pings I had.

Re:Hackers rejoice!

[Anti Cheat]

Your whine is very old and has been discussed to death regarding script banning. Likely you are just trolling but I'll give you the benefit of ignorance to a point.

You didn't get busted for JUST having a hex editor and a macro/scripting application. So stop the bull. You got nailed for one a of several things. I have no idea what one exactly but for example: In some games scripting certain game actions is considered cheating by the game company. They want those actions done by the player and not some script. So the game company asked for this type of cheating to be detected. It wasn't detected simply because you had those programs. The detection looked to see if it was hooked into the game. A similar situation regarded a hex editor hooked into the game. Once again not simply and innocently for just having it on your comp.
There are other examples but I won't go through them all.

Some types of people got very upset by this rule. In many cases they claimed it wasn't cheating because it wasn't some cheat they downloaded or because they used legit programs to automate an action. They simply could not get through their head that just because the game allowed some scripting, but had a problem that prevented the game from people from hooking (or other method) the keyboard and then automating that input as cheating. To speed up manual actions that were intended to make the player do manually is cheating.

my whole point even though I used a couple of examples is that you just weren't innocent as you claimed if PB itself detected the cheat. Perhaps you are thinking of some third party sites that banned you from their servers just because you had those programs in your game directory. Not just anywhere on your comp but specifically in the game directory. They banned because those editors should not be there normally and many cheats loaded those programs into the game directory. So EvenBalance or PB didn't bust you. Some game server admins set that rule via a third party service. Like it or not those servers are privately owned and they set the rules not you.

So, what's new?

[AAWood]

Back in the day, my friends and I were really in to Battlefield 2. As time went on though, I found I just couldn't play; we'd spend 20 minutes trying to find a server with enough slots, and after I joined I'd only be there a few minutes before Punkbuster crashes and I get booted from the game. And I'm being precise there; Punkbuster wasn't identifying me as doing anything wrong (because I wasn't), it would just constantly crash out. We tried a few servers not using punkbuster, and everything was fine. I tried looking for solutions online, uninstalling and reinstalling etc, no go.

It got to the point where we'd meet up time and again to try and play, spend a few hours "playing" BF2, and I'd get maybe half an hour of actual gameplay. We moved onto BF2142; even worse. Updates and patches exacerbated things. Everyone else preferred BF2 and moved back to it. It was now essentially unplayable. When everyone else moved to BF3, I didn't follow.

Just my experience I know, but a damn bad one.