Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
It's just fearmongering from easily scared people that believe every witch story someone posts on the internet.
It's not everyone freaking out, it's just a small group of pretty loud people.
Also, look at their profiles. They're either private or have lots of name changes and VAC bans as well as being generally toxic trolls.
The anticheat is a rootkit (Like most Anticheats.) that allow pretty much full access to your computer. So naturally, people think this can be exploited by someone with knowledge to get into the backdoor the kit provides and steal your personal information. The truth though, is if someone wants into your system, you aren't keeping them out, outside of turning your system off and unplugging it. Real hacking happens in seconds and no amount of protection will stop someone who lives to do that stuff.
The issue at hand is multi faceted and will require you to understand what kernel level anti cheat means. I will try and summarize, but I definitely suggest looking into it further on your own to make an informed choice about your system security.
When something is given kernel level access to your system it is able to do anything it wants, without asking you, any time the system is powered. This level of access is very invasive.
It is important to note that generally speaking the software itself is designed not to abuse this elevated permission set, but that does not make it a totally safe thing. What I mean by this is that by having these kinds of software installed you are allowing additional attack vectors malicious users can exploit.
To give an example, PC gamer reported on an issue where the anti cheat was used to disable antivirus software and then install randsomware (a kind of malware that locks you out of your system entirely until you pay).
https://www.pcgamer.com/ransomware-abuses-genshin-impacts-kernel-mode-anti-cheat-to-bypass-antivirus-protection/
I believe this was their own anti cheat system, but the point is that *any* kernel level anti cheat system can leave you vulnerable for this sort of attack.
The issue with GameGuard specifically is that it is an older Korean anti cheat software that has history regarding this kind of issue. GameGuard was the first one I was made aware of that had been used in this manor. I also found a bug report where a user was unable to use brave browser because of the anti cheat.
See this:
https://community.brave.com/t/brave-cannot-load-webpages-when-nprotect-gameguard-is-running/134348
Edit: I should also point out that because of the nature of closed source anti cheat, it is also a privacy risk due to being unable to look at the code to know what it is *actually* doing with your system. Given that nProtect GameGuard is developed by INCA Internet, a Korean developer that has a lot of power in that country, there are some trust concerns that go along with this.
Edit 2: I incorrectly assumed EAC was what Genshin used, but it appears that it is an in house kernel level anti cheat, so I adjusted my statement to better reflect that.
I would actually argue most hacking is done over periods of time using social engineering to have users give access they shouldn't. Additionally, you can prevent a LOT of real hacking with intelligent usage of network resources and keeping your systems up to date. Real hacking often exploits outdated security risks, or as I said social engineering.
There is a reason that many office based jobs in which you are working with sensitive data regularly have people watch videos about red flags in social engineering. This practice is meant to help people recognize things that allow malicious actors to get around the robust security the systems themselves have. After all, why hack that when you can have a secretary log in for you.
I guess you mean the kind of issue you described before where it disables anti virus software to install ransomeware, which is a really serious issue indeed.
And the only indicator for that to be the case you can bring to the table is an unverified bug report of a single user who claims he couldn‘t use his browser which was automatically closed and seemingly never really investigated by the browser company.
Ok… have to say I’m not convinced.
It fully depends on what the person is hacking/how long they've been "Scoping." their target. It's also fully dependent on what they are doing for the hacking. Removing someone from a game is like snapping your finger and before you have a chance to tug your cord, it's done and over with. Stealing information takes a bit more time because it's delving.
The main issue is that a LOT Of the reports are from a long time ago, its hard to find them now. This was back in 2005. This anti cheat has not really been widely used in a lot of western titles, and* its very hard to find the original articles.
"Additionally, some versions of GameGuard had an unpatched privilege escalation bug, allowing any program to issue commands as if they were running under an Administrator account.[8]"
That is a quote from the wikipedia article and unfortunately I have been unable to find news articles around that time. I suspect many are just not on the internet anymore and the cited page ( https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2005-0295/ ) is also out dated due to its age.
Gotcha, I was under the impression you were talking about hacking in the scope of what I was discussing, rather than in the scope of in games. This is my mistake.
Ultimately alot of games use some form of Anti-Cheat; and it's up to you to decide what kind of programs you are willing to have access to your PC.
I know in my own particular case I've had bad experiences with GameGuard in the past so I'm going to avoid it for now and adopt a wait/see approach. Refund if necessary.
Hopefully you got some clarity and can make an informed decision. Cheers.
I would guess that Sony would not license a 20 year old software that hasn‘t been updated in the meantime.
So even if you had older articles from let’s say 15 years ago it’s very unlikely that they reflect the current state of the software.
Sure you can take the stance that you don’t trust the software because it had security issues in the past.
The question is how reasonable that is.
After all I suspect most people still use AMD after Spectre or Intel after Downfall.
There is nothing I can see that validates the fearmongering that’s going on in this forum about the security of GG in its current iteration.
Also gameguard does -not- uninstall itself when you uninstall the game that installed it on your computer (as its considered to be game protection and 'possibly' needed by other games you play, so it's just left to stay on your computer, 'in case')
This is the uninstaller for gameguard + where it puts its files on your computer if you are interested from the huge giant mega thread that happened about it over on the Undecember forums:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1549250/discussions/0/3388420307302919948/