He was so angry that he wanted to punch the hacker an inch.
Friendly character design, first-class visual effects, and relatively friendly operation difficulty have made “Guilty Gear Fighting” (hereinafter referred to as GGST) one of the most famous fighting games in the world.
In EVO, the largest fighting game tournament in the world, the GGST program has more than 2,000 contestants, almost double that of the traditional fighting series Street Fighter. This is enough to illustrate the influence of GGST in the fighting community.
However, like other fighting games, the promotion of GGST is inseparable from live broadcast and video. Especially Mengxin, they will look for live broadcasts and videos of the bosses, and learn the combos and strategies of each character from them to improve themselves. On Twitch only, EVO
The 2022 GGST project attracted nearly 200,000 viewers to watch at the same time.
Source: Esports Charts website
Such a player ecology is being destroyed by an existing loophole in GGST. A group of unidentified hackers can take advantage of this loophole to directly attack the computers of anchors or top players, ranging from freezes to crashes.
Every GGST player has a string of R-Code codes in the game. This string of codes is equivalent to the player’s unique ID, which contains various information about the player, including the player’s nickname, game history, statistics, etc.
The hacker then used this string of R-Code. Since June last year, they have changed the built-in information of a specific player’s R-Code, such as the nickname, during the game, causing the game to crash, which can only be closed using the task manager, and at the same time make the specific player lose the game.
Late last year and early this year, the breach sparked even greater confusion. Some players reported that hackers were able to control players to send chat messages in the game and deliberately swiped the screen; sometimes these messages also contained sexual harassment content.
According to research by American professional player Hotashi, the R-Code vulnerability can even lead to memory leaks. This will affect the smoothness and performance of online modes, including arcade, dojo, training and other modes. Even in training mode, the speed of the game will be slowed down, “you can’t play normally, just like climbing”. In more severe cases, the computer will blue screen of death.
Although the anchor can mosaic his own R-Code during the live broadcast; professional players can also temporarily stop the live broadcast. But GGST also has a feature that allows players to follow other people, so they can get their real-time online status. Once account activity is shared by followers and tracked by hackers, no top player can do anything about it.
Not only the PC platform, but the GGST of the host platform is also under attack. The targets of hackers are mainly celebrities in the player community, and GGST anchors, large and small, have also been affected successively on Twitch. Hotashi speculates that the hackers may have been located in Eastern Europe, where attacks have subsided a lot in the middle of the night.
Hotashi suggested that the GGST players who were attacked create a private account, set Steam to offline mode, and then play the game. Another female player, Squirrel147, did just that after discovering that a hacker was maliciously targeting her.
There is also Sajam, a fighting game commentator who has been troubled by hackers. On New Year’s Day this year, he deliberately conducted a “speedrun” live broadcast, intending to see how quickly his game has been attacked since the broadcast started. As a result, the game crashed before he finished setting the countdown.
Sajam said in a live video uploaded to Youtube that the timing of the hacker’s large-scale attack is critical. GGST professional players have to prepare for this year’s major competitions, such as GGST developer Arc
System Works holds an annual world tour.
This event requires players to perform well in other events to qualify, and the final qualifying event, Frosty Fausting, will be held on February 3. Due to the online mode being attacked by hackers, a large number of players were unable to conduct normal training. If the bugs are not fixed for a long time, they may not be able to catch the last train to qualify for the competition.
Large-scale competitions generally adopt the form of offline competitions, at least they can continue. As for non-governmental online events, such as the GGST Vtuber Championship originally scheduled to be held on January 6, it has to be postponed until the official bug is fixed.
Faced with the growing anger of players, GGST producer Zack tweeted on January 5: “Back to the office. Go through all the reports.” It implies that the team has realized the existence of loopholes. However, as of the time of writing this article, no official patch has been released, and hackers’ attacks are still continuing.
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