CS2 cheats dev says Valve doesn’t care about cheaters, VAC is easier to bypass than it was in CSGO
Sadly, cheats for multiplayer games are big business, and it doesn’t look like that will change any time soon. One of the prime targets for online cheats is Counter-Strike – the latest entry being CS2. Aside from being an ultra-competitive shooter and often the most played game on Steam, its anti-cheat lacks the same kind of stopping power as alternatives like Valorant.
Unlike Valorant, which uses Riot Vanguard, a kernel-level anti-cheat, Valve is using VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) to try and deter cheaters in Counter-Strike 2. A recent interview with a cheat developer for CS2 makes it clear that these devs find it easy to bypass VAC, especially since Valve remains hesitant to operate at the kernel level.
Interview with a cheats dev for Counter-Strike 2
The interview was conducted by bo3.gg, so if you want to read through the entire thing, we recommend checking it out here. Unsurprisingly, the developer chose to remain anonymous, and the specific name of the cheat is unnamed. All we know is that they are based in Ukraine and originally started developing cheats for extra cash as “a student with no real job”.
“Honestly it’s not pretty hard to stay UD [undetected] by VAC nowadays as it is… purely ornamental at this point, it was harder to bypass back in the old CSGO days. We do not change client-side memory, X is read-only. A kernel AC – yes, that would hurt us. But that goes against Valve’s current policy.”
Anonymous CS2 cheat developer
The developer bluntly claims that “Valve doesn’t give a s***” about external cheats. VAC fails to detect the cheats they developed as it lacks access to the cheat memory, with no access to the cheat process or window. Again, without any kernel-level protection, bypassing VAC has become easier than ever. CS2 also doesn’t take extra measures like requiring Secure Boot, something that EA has turned to for upcoming Battlefield 6 (Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will also require it), and is already the case in Valorant.
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Every legitimate player is asking for it, so why isn’t Valve improving VAC? Well, there have been attempts to do so on the server side of things, notably VACnet, which was introduced back in the CSGO days, but it’s clear cheaters have easily outpaced Valve’s countermeasures. VACnet uses AI to analyze player behaviour and flag suspicious activity to submit to its Overwatch system; however, Overwatch (a feature that allows players to review suspected cheaters’ replays) is not yet widely available in CS2.
Valve will be hesitant to implement kernel-level cheats, given the backlash this more intrusive method generally gets, plus it may break compatibility for its very own Steam Deck, which runs on the Linux-based SteamOS. The interviewed dev shared their views on the server-side AI-based method Valve has developed with VACnet, saying, “I think they’re doing the right thing focusing on server-side AI and statistical detection, just they’re not great at it.”
“Yes, I think a proper AC will be a huge hit on the cheat market – at the price of a lot of users playing on older PCs, though. TF [trust factor] works well in Europe and NA, you’re heavily unlikely to meet a cheater on green trust below ~18k which is what the system is supposed to achieve.”
Anonymous CS2 cheat developer
