On September 13, chaos broke out in cheat forums revolving around Counter-Strike 2, with cheaters complaining that they were getting banned for using methods that were previously considered undetectable.
This was a direct result of Valve’s VAC Live update on the same date, with the company cracking down on cheaters and rendering nearly all forms of known cheats completely ineffective overnight.
The news was first brought to light by prominent CS2 leaker and dataminer Gabe Follower on X. According to him, the new VAC Live update had completely “annihilated almost all known cheats, including some wallhacks and trigger bots that work through DMA cards.”
The post by Gabe Follower also featured a screenshot in which a presumed cheat developer admitted that the VAC Live update was “pretty strong.”
Before this update, hardware-level cheats such as DMA (Direct Memory Access) cards were regarded as virtually undetectable, since they operate independently of the host system’s software stack and communicate directly with system memory. Valve’s latest update appears to address this blind spot, implying that external devices and memory manipulation techniques operating outside traditional user-mode or kernel-mode injection pathways are now being monitored and flagged.
In a follow-up X post, the leaker mentioned that the new update also cracked down on case farming bots, which were becoming a growing concern within the community, with Deathmatch lobbies frequently overrun by bots farming for cases.
Needless to say, the CS2 community has been ecstatic about the VAC Live update, with many players expressing their joy across social media and forums. Some, however, remain skeptical, claiming that the game will soon be overrun with cheaters again once cheat devs find a workaround.
Valve has not made an official statement regarding this VAC Live update at the time of writing.
