Over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts Permanently banned

In recent weeks, more than 40,000 Dota 2 accounts have been permanently banned after they were caught using third-party software to cheat the game. In a blog post on Tuesday, Valve revealed that it had fixed a recently known issue that used third-party software to cheat in Dota, while setting up a honeypot trap to catch players who took advantage of it.

According to Valve, the cheating software gave its users an unfair advantage by accessing data used internally by the Dota client that should not be visible during gameplay. After studying how it works, the developer decided to identify and remove “bad actors” from Dota’s active player base.
“We released the patch as soon as we realized the method these cheaters were using,” Valve said. “This patch created a honeypot: data within the game program that is never read during normal gameplay, but can be read with these exploits.”

Valve claims that all 40,000 now-banned accounts had access to this section of hidden information and that they had “very high confidence that each ban was well-earned.”

Valve emphasized that the number of banned accounts is particularly significant because this family of fraudulent customers is common and the actions taken are just one step in an ongoing campaign to combat abusers of the popular MOBA game. “While the fight against cheaters and rogue developers often takes place in the shadows, we wanted to highlight this example and use it to make our point:

If you use any application that reads data from the Dota client while playing games on your account, you may be permanently banned from playing Dota,” Valve warned.