2 min read

Game Exploits and Safety

Note: A game cheater is an exploiter, not a hacker. They’re just manipulating content which is hidden, but accessible. A hacker would be someone stealing your password and logging into your accounts.

Thanks to all the new websites and YouTubers coming up, finding cheaters in game has become extremely common. For some games, it can be a surprise to not have a cheater in the session. Its especially easy to obtain cheat tools, but should you? Its not like you should rely on anti-virus programs for help on exploits.

In my opinion, relying on anti-malware programs to check for an exploit’s safety is silly. Of course the anti-malware program will flag an exploit as malicious; its because the nature of exploitation is malicious. Its just that in the intended cases, the malicious action is exactly what you want. For example, for your cheat software to highlight others players(ESP), it may need to manipulate a foreign piece of software, the actual game in question.

With more and more people making exploits, its expected for there to be more users, especially when the cheats are free. It has become so easy and fast to make cheats that even a kid using the WeAreDevs API can make something powerful. Thing is though, the fact that anyone can make software is red flag in it self. It isn’t just companies or other people who care about their reputations making exploits anymore. Some shady person can create a working exploit that also has malware to damage your computer. To protect yourself from this, you need to do research before downloading exploits. Some good points to check for are:

*If the exploit is shown by popular YouTube channels. If they weren’t hacked and still have their channel, that's probably a good sign. I imagine a hacker would want to steal their channel or at least mess with it.
*If it appears on Google searches with positive remarks. Google takes some steps to filter out content that is definitely not safe. If results do appear, read a few reviews on it just to be sure.
*If the creator or distributor has made themself known and has a positive reputation to protect. People with good reputations have probably taken lots of time to build their status. As a creator, I’d be terrified to release malware. I wouldn’t want my fans/users to start leaving.
*If other people are using the exploit. If you see that an exploit is fairly popular, its probably trusted by a community. Look for download counts, YouTube comments, reviews, friends that use it, etc.

It isn’t smart to check for only one of those signs, so you check check for multiple.

You should be extremely cautious when downloading exploits. As stated earlier, anyone can make software, even kids. Note that even an exploit that operates as expected could contain dormant malware just waiting to attack you.

It's really a trust situation with whether or not you should download someone’s content.