Hello,

Occasionally the game list on a given gateway (e.g. US East) is unusable. By that, someone uses a hack to redirect all the games to their own game, usually labeled A > B or A OWN YOU, where A is some variable.

My question is, how does this hack work? I'm a software engineer, so I'm curious what is actually going on (and really curious why another programmer would do something so malicious).

What I noticed defeats this hack is:

1. Making a private/password game.

2. Using some kind of Ip Blocker, which blocks certains IP addresses related to the hack.

The server allows any user to change the game name of any game because it doesn't check who's the host. A malicious user can send packet 0x1C with the modified game name and the server will then reflect that to everyone. My guess is that the server at least checks to see if the user sending that packet is actually in the game lobby and denies the packet if the user isn't.
It's probably possible to counter this by continuously sending packets with the proper data which will overwrite the data from the packet that the malicious user sent, I'm just not sure if anti-flooding protection applies to this packet.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jan 11 2016, 7:46 am by iCCup.xboi209.

But how does a malicious user persist in doing this? Clearly nobody keeps checking the game list and changing the name of each one as it comes along. It sounds like someone wrote some software that monitors the game list and periodically sends out these packets to change the game name ?

Can this be used to redirect players to an authentic game? It seems when this hack is going, the game is redirected to a non-joinable map.

Exactly.

And that software is publicly available if you look hard enough.