Learn the role of VAC in Counter-Strike Global Offensive

If you’ve ever played Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, you’ve probably heard of VAC (Valve Anti Check) – Valve’s anti-hacking program. But it can be a little confusing for new players to understand about all the anti-cheat Valve uses to protect CSGO. Some complain that Valve’s anti-cheat doesn’t work, but a more objective look is that it doesn’t detect all hacks. Valve’s most famous anti-cheat system is Valve Anti-Cheat, or VAC for short.

VAC is Valve’s own anti-cheat system

VAC runs in Valve games including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Left for Dead 2, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, with the task of scanning programs running in the game. These software are compared with Valve’s hacking data to investigate what the software is running, whether it is OBS used to stream or it is a fraudulent hack like wall hack, aimbot.

For new players, there are a few important things to understand. Valve said that except for extremely rare cases, VAC bans are correct. That is, if you get banned by VAC, Valve is more than 99% confident that the player used the hack. But sometimes, VAC isn’t perfect either. As hacking becomes increasingly difficult to detect, VAC sometimes can’t keep up with the new ways hackers create to break into Valve games.

As you can see in the image above from Steam.db, the VAC really does its job. If a hack is found in Valve’s data, VAC will ban it immediately. Contrary to popular belief, VAC is not ‘fake’. It just doesn’t have enough information to catch up with the hackers.

Valve also has other anti-cheat practices, especially in games like CSGO. Overwatch (the mechanism to view the demo of suspected hacking cases) is an example. When a player reaches a certain rank and reaches enough hours of gameplay, they will be given the opportunity to review the demos, and then decide if the player is cheating or not.

Valve also upgraded Overwatch’s performance to train its own AI to better detect hacks. Since Valve also isn’t sure if the player’s judgments in Overwatch are 100% correct, those who get Overwatch will only be banned by Overwatch. They are not the same as VAC boards. While VAC bans are permanent and tied to user accounts, Overwatch bans only last for a while.

While VAC can’t catch every type of cheat, CSGO players should still be confident about Valve’s anti-cheat. When you see an account that says “VAC Ban” it is definitely a hack. Although not very good at detecting hacks, Valve made sure that when the VAC ban appeared, that person was probably using software that changed CSGO to gain an unfair advantage in the game.

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