Customer Reviews

Exploring Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a programmer point of view, this book is useless. Before buying the book, I want to know how to debug a game, how to find NPC offset, and how to find functions used inside the game. This book is mostly about what is legal and what is not. I have learned nothing from this book.

By the way, you can read more in my book . . .
If you want to know more, buy . . .
Discuss further in my book and every other book printed by my publishing company . . .

This book is a mess of poorly explained code snippets and self promotion. Also, it focues 90% of its hacking on WoW. If you don't know anything about World of Warcraft, then you will be completly lost. I have /timeplayed 1000 hours, so I could follow all of the WoW references, but unfamiliar readers will not understand large parts of the book.

Half of the work in this book is just cut and pasted from code scattered on the internet. If you don't know C++, how to exploit the Windows OS, or modifying memory, these walls of code don't make much sense.

This is the first book I have ever returned. The constant self promoting and lazy cut and paste code just frustrated the hell out of me.

This is by far the worst book I have ever bought. I just finished a systems programming class which I received an A in and at times this book left me guessing at what was going on. In my honest opinion I could have found a script kiddie on a random set of forums on the internet that would explain the code in the book better then the authors did. Most of the code seems to be stolen from random World of Warcraft hacks that other people have produced. Most of the book leaves open ended paragraphs that say "this is possible, but to understand it you must buy my other book ...". For a book that was supposed to help developers prevent such vulnerabilities it only seems to aid in letting the reader know that certain types of vulnerabilities exist. I couldn't stop laughing when I came to the section titled "Standing Way Outside the Game: Manipulating Network Packets". This section starts out promising with a nice introduction but as soon as you turn the page all that's there is a "screenshot" of code from another World of Warcraft script to decrypt packets. End section. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.

As someone who doesn't play online games, I approached this book with more curiosity than a practical need. It's an worthwhile read, although having a background with game terminology would certainly have made it easier to understand. Technical readers will want to skip straight to chapter 5 and read the second half of the book, which includes many detailed explanations of how to manipulate games to your advantage.

The focus of the book is on manipulating the client side of the game, with relatively little on server vulnerabilities. There's also not very much guidance to game designers on how to avoid the problems covered in the book.

I was pleased that the book covers not only the security issues, but also related topics such as privacy, and the ethical issues for both providers of online games and the hackers who play and subvert the games.

Many of the lessons are applicable to any distributed system with thick clients, including not only game software but also business systems. As such, it's worthwhile reading for developers of nearly any distributed system, as it will give a reasonably accurate picture of the lengths that attackers are willing to go to in compromising a distributed system, and the abilities they have to manipulate software without designs or source code.

This is the product of the Hoglund's forays into cheating at Warcraft. He did an excellent Black Hat presentation on the same subject in 2006, as well.

Even if you're a security expert, this will teach you things. For example, the requirements of games (responsiveness, good use of network bandwidth, etc.) force them to design their systems with risk, and that risk can be exploited. The only alternative is to run the entire game on their servers and have the client programs be merely display stations, and that just won't work. It makes for a very good read.

Even Hoglund's political rants are fun to read, even as they ring hollow. It's okay for him to hack the system by any means necessary, because he's a hacker and that's what hackers do. But it's not okay for the people who run these games to hack him back because that's an invasion of privacy. How dare they! It strikes me that the real offense is that he was out-hacked, and yeah, it's annoying to lose.

I rate it only three stars because I expect it will not age well. If you're reading this review in 2007, buy the book, it's great. Buy it, you'll love it. If you're reading it in 2008, 2009, or beyond, recognize that the principles he shows are liable to be true for a long time, but the details have a shelf-life.

Although I'm not a computer gamer, I am immensely impressed by what goes into on-line games -- and amazed at the huge communities of folks that can enjoy their efforts. What a great audience to communicate the software security lessons to!

On-line games, particularly the newer, massively networked ones, are obviously ripe for attackers to dupe. Even though they're intended to "just" be games, real attacks can take place that have serious consequences to the communities that play these games.

More importantly, though, by demonstrating problems in these for-fun pieces of software, Gary and Greg have done a great service to everyone who works in software. The mistakes made in on-line games are, without a doubt, rooted in software issues that are found in "real world" software as well.

This is a great opportunity to explore the sorts of software security problems that plague far too many of our systems, from games to mission critical enterprise applications, today.

This is an important book even if you are not a gamer. Their thesis is that these sorts of massively-parallel online systems are the wave of the future is correct. There are a variety of important (and fascinating) security lessons here, and there is now no excuse for future system designers reprise these errors.

Of course, if you are a gamer, these hacks are even cooler. The arms race continues...

I thought the book would contain more about FPS cheating and less about WoW. It's 90% about WoW. I don't work on an MMO so I got bored fast.

Not a horrible book, but not great either. I preferred Hoglund's Rootkit book since it had more generic approaches to subverting win32 processes.

If you work on an MMO, you should probably pick this one up.

Eager to try out the Kindle application for the iPhone--as well as recently kicking a World of Warcraft addiction--I thought this would be a fun read. While the substance of the book itself is worthy of a separate review, I'd like to focus on the Kindle experience of this text.

The text features numerous sidebars: gray-background side topics tangentially related to the main text. However, on the Kindle for iPhone, the majority of these sidebars are truncated.

That is, their ends are chopped off.

For such an expensive ebook, I'd expect to get the complete text. Not so here.

Well, the title says it all. The book talked about some useless topics such as why to cheat and about cheating. It also showed source code from other peoples programs (already open-source), and somewhat explained what each part of it does, but didn't go in to details (users like me who don't know about memory modification didn't understand it at all). Not to mention that all of the programs they use as an example will get you banned because of Warden. They don't talk about the biggest problem with botting which is how fast you will get banned without protection.

I actually write bots for World of Warcraft using Innerspace (and ISXWoW). If you really want to bot and don't know enough to modify memory and reverse engineer large scale programs, look into those instead of this book.