Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems

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.

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.

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.

Read this book and enjoyed every minute,It is technical but also full of details for anyone who is not technical.

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.

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.

A very pedestrian trudge through the bowels of the sleazy side of World of Warcraft. The book contains little that has not been common knowledge in the MUD community for decades, and WoW players ever since the game started. The book's do it yourself farming bot - pages and page of C++ code - is only of any use to those who are already capable of writing one themselves.