New CSGO beta update restricts third-party programs’ interactions to fight cheaters

CSGO devs have significantly reduced the types of programs and files allowed to interact with the game from background.

csgo update
csgo update today

The fight against cheaters in CSGO continues, as the devs are looking to take some strict measures to curb cheating in their competitive shooter. Today’s CSGO update features a new beta branch for the game which players can optionally opt into to help the fight against cheaters.

The beta will “significantly restrict” the number of third-party programs and files which are allowed to interact with the game, thus reducing the likelihood of cheaters running any sort of cheating software in the background.

In case a player runs the game with these types of restricted programs, they’ll receive a warning after launching the game which will indicate the name of the blocked file and will be prevented from joining any VAC-secure servers. To fix this issue, players can choose to disable the ‘Trusted Launch’ which can be found in the in-game settings, however doing so might temporarily reduce the trust factor of the player, as mentioned by the devs in their blog post.

A problem which might have arisen as a result of this update was the difficulties which the developers of genuine third-party softwares would face, and this issue was also addressed by the CSGO devs.

The blog post said, “For developers of third-party programs that interact directly with the CS:GO executable process, we have added requirements that will impact your software. Moving forward, all DLLs that interact with CS:GO will need to be digitally signed with an Authenticode signature. Additionally, we will block signed DLLs if their functionality interferes with the game in any way.”

Moving forward, this update might be a big step towards lowering the amount of cheaters currently found in the game. This beta branch is likely to be added to the main client soon, when its consequences will be more prominent.