Danny "bullet-worm" Mitchell, PAM Mod Coder: Backgroud: PunkBuster coding has been deemed antiquated in regards to anti-cheat strategies and tactics (even the "black-screenshot" bug that plagued CoD1 has been blamed on antiquated coding). Meanwhile, several new-comers to the anti-cheat arena have come out with some great ideas for new anti-cheat technologies. What new technologies has PB developed to fight cheating recently? And what plans do they have for upgrading their "antiquated" anti-cheat beyond simply adding new "publicly released" memory patterns to the hack database/scan?

Tony Ray: Yeah ... deemed by who? Police forces all over the country have also been deemed antiquated (by some people) in their crime fighting methods, do you think we should do away with Police? PunkBuster has been on the cutting edge of anti-cheat technology since it was developed as the first client/server Anti-Cheat tool for online gaming. If it were possible to go back and mark the milestones in the anti-cheat niche industry, you would find that PunkBuster was first at successfully introducing virtually every important feature found in modern anti-cheat systems. But you are right about one thing, the PB screenshot code is old (as compared to game technology) and has been due for a complete overhaul for some time. It is important to us and we expect to have this overhaul done, tested and released in future auto-updates across all games we support. However, it is still useful "as is" and detecting new hacks/cheats is a higher priority to us than a rewrite of something that works in a satisfactory manner already.

We have made large strides recently in detecting hacks that attempt to bypass our existing screenshot code. Now about these new-comers to the anti-cheat arena, I haven't read anything really earth shattering or new from any of them. Perhaps they are keeping their best ideas secret, who knows? But the one supposedly big new idea of whitelisting drivers and modules etc. to lock down the client is not new at all. In fact, that was tried multiple times by some very smart game coders before I came up with the idea for PunkBuster. All attempts that I am aware of failed miserably. I considered this and some other methods now being called "new" over five years ago when PunkBuster was originally conceived and rejected them for various reasons. In some cases, we tested some of these methods over the years and found them to be unreliable across the wide spectrum of hardware, drivers and services in use by gamers all over the world. It is common for certain people to say that all we do is keep a database of patterns and update that when new cheats come out, but PunkBuster is so much more than that (even though that old method still catches most of the cheats released these days). We are proud of PunkBuster's successes but we haven't stopped improving just because our original methods worked so well several years ago. We just don't publicize the vast majority of the improvements. You don't have to scan cheat forums very long to see that we have in fact caught punks using private cheats who never released them - the original PB couldn't do that very well, but we do that all the time now. Look at the sites that charge money for hacks, virtually none of them have open forums any more - that is because we embarrassed them by catching their punk 'customers' so many times they made the real forums private to avoid scaring off would-be buyers of their baloney. Plus most punks caught with a private hack never admit it on a public forum anyway.