Incoming Warden and What This Means
Posted: 28 Sep 2011, 02:49
Many of you voted in our recent poll asking the community their opinions on implementing Warden into our core. We received 25 responses all unanimously voting "Yes" for its implementation.
So we've begun to get it ready and hopefully by this weekend it will be in place on Smolderforge. For those of you unaware, Warden is what I've referred to our anti-cheat before, mainly because it was the closest thing at the time to prevent hackers. However there is a tremendous difference, so forgive my previous terminology. An anti-cheat is a bit of C++ programming. It's made up of lots and lots of if statements, checking to see IF something is changed or different or that should not be happening (aka hacking) and then to do something about it. Warden on the other hand, is the real Blizzard client that is running every time you play WoW. Warden is integrated into WoW. It scans your RAM every second your WoW game is running. However, for private servers it's never had anything to report, or communicate to -- until now.
While it is no longer 2.4.3 and therefore it's not as easy to produce checks for hacking programs or receive the ones from retail anymore from their Warden, it is still possible for us to make memory-checks. Memory checks are a bit of hackish-looking stuff that simply is memory hashes that literally tell Warden what it is, and what to look out for in the WoW process. They are a bit hard and timely to make as you have to do a lot of memory-scanning and such. WoWEmuHacker and a Lua-injector have already been written protection against. If you watched in the video on the Warden poll I submitted it will disconnect the player repeatably if their WoW process has been injected with anything. So pretty much players trying to wall-climb or faction hack should now be stopped quite easily. The ones using WEH at least.
We plan on changing this in the future though. Eventually we'll take off the kicking and replace it with 24-hour suspensions. We don't want to start off doing that right away because I'm quite certain a good 1/3 - 1/2 of the community would probably get suspended that day. What is exciting about Warden is that you don't have to be actually hacking for it to catch you. The moment you run that program into WoW is the moment it catches you.
So expect to see this soon. We've been making some small optimizations to it to do a bit less logging for debugging as well as modifying the check timer to ~2 seconds instead of 10 to catch players faster. From what has been reported Warden uses little to no CPU which is extremely impressive.
So we've begun to get it ready and hopefully by this weekend it will be in place on Smolderforge. For those of you unaware, Warden is what I've referred to our anti-cheat before, mainly because it was the closest thing at the time to prevent hackers. However there is a tremendous difference, so forgive my previous terminology. An anti-cheat is a bit of C++ programming. It's made up of lots and lots of if statements, checking to see IF something is changed or different or that should not be happening (aka hacking) and then to do something about it. Warden on the other hand, is the real Blizzard client that is running every time you play WoW. Warden is integrated into WoW. It scans your RAM every second your WoW game is running. However, for private servers it's never had anything to report, or communicate to -- until now.
While it is no longer 2.4.3 and therefore it's not as easy to produce checks for hacking programs or receive the ones from retail anymore from their Warden, it is still possible for us to make memory-checks. Memory checks are a bit of hackish-looking stuff that simply is memory hashes that literally tell Warden what it is, and what to look out for in the WoW process. They are a bit hard and timely to make as you have to do a lot of memory-scanning and such. WoWEmuHacker and a Lua-injector have already been written protection against. If you watched in the video on the Warden poll I submitted it will disconnect the player repeatably if their WoW process has been injected with anything. So pretty much players trying to wall-climb or faction hack should now be stopped quite easily. The ones using WEH at least.
We plan on changing this in the future though. Eventually we'll take off the kicking and replace it with 24-hour suspensions. We don't want to start off doing that right away because I'm quite certain a good 1/3 - 1/2 of the community would probably get suspended that day. What is exciting about Warden is that you don't have to be actually hacking for it to catch you. The moment you run that program into WoW is the moment it catches you.
So expect to see this soon. We've been making some small optimizations to it to do a bit less logging for debugging as well as modifying the check timer to ~2 seconds instead of 10 to catch players faster. From what has been reported Warden uses little to no CPU which is extremely impressive.