Valve sets trap for cheaters in Dota 2, permanently bans over 40,000 accounts

Valve is taking strict action against cheaters in the popular MOBA title DOTA 2. Over 40,000 DOTA 2 players have been permanently banned in the past couple of weeks after being caught using third-party software to cheat the game.

According to a blog post, Valve noted that the software used by cheaters was able to access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn't visible during normal gameplay, giving the cheater an unfair advantage. The company made fixing the issue that made the cheat possible a top priority, although it also decided to remove the bad actors from DOTA’s playerbase.

Earlier this week, Valve revealed that it patched a known issue used by third-party software to cheat in Dota, while simultaneously setting a honeypot trap to catch players using the exploit, according to The Verge.

In its release, Valve noted, “we released a patch as soon as we understood the method these cheats were using. This patch created a honeypot: a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits. Each of the accounts banned today read from this "secret" area in the client, giving us extremely high confidence that every ban was well-deserved.”

Valve also noted that it wanted to make an example and clarify its position against cheating. “While the battle against cheaters and cheat developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to make this example visible, and use it to make our position clear.”