Intro to Game Hacking: DEFCON 32

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[stevest]

My hacking origin story began with game hacking. I love the disclaimers everyone does before.

[hackinggood]

John Hammond is the "David Attenborough" of cyber security youtube channels, and more 😁

[Palmit_]

Yes Please. there are some good tutorials about Cheat Engine on Youtube, but John, you manage to explain and show concepts in a way that is more matched to my learning ability. Looking forward to learning LUA scripting and finding advanced pointers and more advanced things about CE.

[UnfiItered]

The basic memory manipulation from CE. Where the fun part is the lua/scripts and pointers. Sometimes just the basic memory manipulation isn't enough, now you need to play with the pointers and set up a lua/script. You'll notice that some games, even when you do memory manipulation, the manipulation doesn't stick. You dig deep enough and you can change things. Say for example you want to change a item into another item. Or change a character into another character. All possible.

[implode]

Kind of what got me into programming, grabbing text files from Ultima 4 or other early games as a kid.

[Ozzy-Cricket]

I was game hacking in my teens in the early 90s. That consisted of trawling through assembler reading the program sector by disk sector to get around protections.. Now those were the days..

[Dakktyrel]

This reminds me of the Diablo 2 character editors back in the 90's. Cool stuff, thank you sir.

[DevynPlaysGames]

It's so weird seeing Cheat Engine in a John Hammond video. I used this tool as a kid. Thought everyone did.

Although, I also modded ds games and installed custom firmware as a kid, so maybe it's not that normal

[bankmanager]

This is a great video. I haven't used cheat engine in about 10 years but I had no idea what I was doing then.

[DigitalDimension]

This video really brought back memories! I used to play around with Cheat Engine as a kid, tweaking single-player games just for fun—changing variables, giving myself more money, and exploring game mechanics in ways I never thought of as “hacking.” For me, it was always just playing around, never something I considered a serious hacking activity. Watching you dive into the same tool with a cybersecurity lens is both nostalgic and eye-opening. It’s incredible how something that starts as innocent fun can develop into valuable skills in the cybersecurity field. I had no malicious intent; for me, it was just playing around.

[Kustar.h]

im a big game hacking enthusiast, i love you John

[YuviApp]

As someone who is always reverse engineering games.
If this was me in a CTF, I would have just found the value that controls the enemies health by using “unknown starting value” then damaged the gun/unicorn, paused then then did “value decreased” and keep repeating that until I found a value that seems to align with a health bar. Therefore you could just set the enemy object to 0 HP and beat the objective. And depending on how the game was programmed it might use the same memory location for same enemy on each map. If you had multiple enemies, pull up the memory viewer then look at that region of memory which should have all the enemies attributes in a one location.

[HEXiT_]

been a fan of cheat-engine for over a decade now.
there example walkthrough.. not the easiest to follow..
but getting the basics..
easy enough.

fair warning though.
always manually update CE and block its in-coming and outgoing connections.

as it has in the past tried to put a dropper on my system.
the dropper can be quarantined and doesn't affect the application running..


but know it can turn up if you leave cheat engines ports open.


:)

[netting.]

Very nice video with a pretty interesting topic! Hope to see more on this ;)

[.palebluedot]

Hi John! amazing walkthrough. Would love to see some tutorials as well as to how USB Rubber ducky works.

[NemanjaVojinovic-xg]

Cant believe Cheat Engine is still around. I remember using it like in 2012, 2013 maybe :D Those were days :D Nice

[sassywoocooo]

oh boy keep up this kind of stuff. i love gaming.

[richbecker]

Great video I'll like to see more game hacking for sure

[Wr-wlf]

Nice one, john!!! I remember doing reverse engineering with a cheat engine, and it was awesome... for changing values in games even in jalibroken iPhone for mobile penetration back then the process was same but with different tools.

[OKRASSnaky]

What's nice is that Cheat Engines goes so beyond game hacking only, as this might be one of the simplest yet efficient way to bypass any thick client stuff (like so called "security licence keys", "activation codes", etc). So one of the nicest way I use to prove that some thick client projects are doomed from scratch and are actually far better suited for SaaS business instead.