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huH? lol is your life gonna end if you can't play the latest COD? you ALWAYS have a choice. play last years or play some battlefield!!? BF2042 looks sweet if they can get the performance issue ironed out.
I'm typing this on a Sandy Bridge laptop. I do all my business transactions on this computer (more or less), including shopping email, messaging, blah blah. I'm typing on said machine. I don't need my gaming machine for any of this.
PunkBuster
Ok few things:
Agreed.
No, that's not stupid at all. Your antivirus scanner arguably can't get you OS/kernel-level access on a sensible OS even with unpatched vulns. More importantly you choose to explicitly install that antivirus scanner whereas this junk bloatware gets installed alongside your games (smells very much like malware/rootkit to me). These anticheat utilities presumably make lots of network connections, interface with questionable game services, and are usually not updated once the game reaches EOL for the publisher - even worse, the user can't even control the updates for this garbage. All this leaves us with a ridiculously large attack surface and potential for exploits to gain "root" (well really "supervisor" since we're in the kernel now) access; ie rootkit. We're not talking runs with administrator/elevated permissions here, we are talking about full-blown runs in kernel space.
Oh fucking hell no.
Preferences. I like to develop on my best computer. Also, still sounds sketchy to have a computer relegated to insecure software unless you're a security researcher. Remember the steam account is on it
If a private server mod boots a cheating player from a private server, that cheating player will just join another private server after getting booted and start cheating again. Also, there are tons of instances where there isn't a server mod present when a player is cheating.
Sure it can. Your AV hooks in to the OS at a VERY low level. Not only does it run in the kernel, but it enjoys a position of privilege where it loads quite early in the boot sequence. It has access to anything it wants. It has to have access to all memory to effectively scan for viruses. Also, any AV scanner worth its shit is on the network. At a minimum it download updates multiple times a day and really you want one that can do realtime checking on unknown processes. Guess what? Those updates can instruct it to change its behaviour, it could be ordered to grant the AV company remote access. Also given that these days usually it isn't your AV software, it is your endpoint security software, meaning it does firewall, HIPS, NIPS, etc you wouldn't know it had done it unless you had something on your network monitoring for it.
A console is going to likely give games kernel level if they want it, cause there is nothing you can do about it, who knows what level games already have in a console...and now that device is also on your home network....at least on a PC I have a choice..console you get to do what they say you get to do, no other way about it.
This is what I'd call out. While obviously root/kernel access is bad for a great many reasons - for all intents and purposes you can be "owned" without any admin level attack at all.
We see a lot of malware these days that doesn't bother. It just owns the user account since on most systems, that does the trick and there are no issues with users noticing a request for admin access or anything.
Not on recent consoles. Games are heavily sandboxed. Consoles have very hardened OSes. The reason is anti-piracy and other DRM. They want NOTHING to have kernel access. To give a game kernel access is to give users a way to get it. They are tightly locked down platforms these days.
I'm pretty sure DICE has been using PunkBuster since about this time in 2002 when Battlefield 1942 came out.
I know. But first: it's not a Trojan hijacking the entire network... it's just a game system.
Insider threat is always the biggest threat for any organization.
Those are just the games that I've played on PC with a kernel anti-cheat.
. I was at Best Buy while my mom was buying toner or some crap for her office workers to use and per the usual I browsed the PC games. I saw the coolest box art and checked the system requirements, perhaps the best $39.99 I've ever spent.