• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.121-129
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• 2011

In an online-game, the various game service victimized cases are generated by the bots program or auto program. Particularly, the abnormal collection of the game money and item loses the inherent fun of a game. It reaches ultimately the definite bad effect to the game life cycle. This paper collects and analyzes the pattern of game behavior change for the bots detection method. By using the game activity changing information of the human and game activity changing information of the bots, the degree of resemblance was measured. It utilized in the bots detection method. In an experiment, by using the served online-game, the model of a user and bots were generated and similarity was distinguished. And the reasonable result was confirmed.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.45 no.4
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• pp.713-723
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• 2023

Game bots are illegal programs that facilitate account growth and goods acquisition through continuous and automatic play. Early detection is required to minimize the damage caused by evolving game bots. In this study, we propose a game bot detection method based on action time intervals (ATIs). We observe the actions of the bots in a game and identify the most frequently occurring actions. We extract the frequency, ATI average, and ATI standard deviation for each identified action, which is to used as machine learning features. Furthermore, we measure the performance using actual logs of the Aion game to verify the validity of the proposed method. The accuracy and precision of the proposed method are 97% and 100%, respectively. Results show that the game bots can be detected early because the proposed method performs well using only data from a single day, which shows similar performance with those proposed in a previous study using the same dataset. The detection performance of the model is maintained even after 2 months of training without any revision process.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.53-61
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• 2009

Game industry, especially MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) has rapidly been expanding in these days. In this background, lots of online game security incidents have been increasing and getting more diversity. One of the most critical security incidents is 'Bots', mimics human player's playing behaviors. Bots performs the task without any manual works, it is considered unfair with other players. So most game companies try to block Bots by analyzing the packets between clients and servers. However this method can be easily attacked, because the packets are changeable when it is send to server. In this paper, we propose a Bots detection method by observing the playing patterns of game characters with data on server. In this method, Bots developers cannot handle the data, because it is working on server. Therefore Bots cannot avoid it and we can find Bots users more completely.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.4200-4206
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• 2012

Recently, online-game industry has been rapidly expanding in these days. But, the various game service victimized cases are generated by the bots program. Particularly, the abnormal collection of the game money and item loses the inherent fun of a game. It reaches ultimately the definite bad effect to the game life cycle. In this paper, we propose a Bots detection method by observing the playing patterns of game characters with game log data. It analyzed behaviors of human players as well as bots and identified features to build the model to differentiate bots from human players. In an experiment, by using the served online-game, the model of a user and bots were generated was distinguished. And the reasonable result was confirmed.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.35 no.6
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• pp.1058-1067
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• 2013

An approach for game bot detection in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) based on the analysis of game playing behavior is proposed. Since MMORPGs are large-scale games, users can play in various ways. This variety in playing behavior makes it hard to detect game bots based on play behaviors. To cope with this problem, the proposed approach observes game playing behaviors of users and groups them by their behavioral similarities. Then, it develops a local bot detection model for each player group. Since the locally optimized models can more accurately detect game bots within each player group, the combination of those models brings about overall improvement. Behavioral features are selected and developed to accurately detect game bots with the low resolution data, considering common aspects of MMORPG playing. Through the experiment with the real data from a game currently in service, it is shown that the proposed local model approach yields more accurate results.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.1077-1084
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• 2015

Security issues such as an illegal acquisition of personal information and identity theft happen due to using game bots in online games. Game bots collect items and money unfairly, so in-game contents are rapidly depleted, and honest users feel deprived. It causes a downturn in the game market. In this paper, we defined the growth types by analyzing the growth processes of users with actual game data. We proposed the framework that classify hard-core users and game bots in the growth patterns. We applied the framework in the actual data. As a result, we classified five growth types and detected game bots from hard-core users with 93% precision. Earlier studies show that hard-core users are also detected as a bot. We clearly separated game bots and hard-core users before full growth.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.1115-1122
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• 2015

In recent years, the use of game bots by illegal programs has been expanded from individual to group scale; this brings about serious problems in online game industry. The gold farmers group creates an in-game social community so-called "guild" to obtain a large amount of game money and manage game bots efficiently. Although game developers detect game bots by detection algorithms, the algorithms can detect only part of the gold farmers group. In this paper, we propose a detection method for the gold farmers group on a basis of normal and bot guilds characteristic analysis. In order to differentiate normal and bots guild, we analyze transaction patterns for individuals, auction house and chatting. With the analyzed results, we can detect game bot guilds. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods with real datasets from one of the popular online games named AION in Korea.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.157-163
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• 2022

As the online game market grows, the use of game bots is causing the most serious problem for game services. We propose a harvest coordinate analysis model to detect harvesting bots among game bots of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games(MMORPGs) genre. The proposed model analyzes the player's harvesting behavior using the coordinate data. Game bots can obtain in-game goods and items more easily than normal players and are not affected by realistic restrictions such as sleep time and character manipulation fatigue. As a result, there is a difference in harvesting coordinates between normal players and game bots. We divided the coordinate zones and used these coordinate zone differences to distinguish between game bot players and normal players. We created a dataset with NCSoft's AION log and applied it to a random forest model to detect game bots, and as a result, we derived performance with a recall of 0.72 and a precision of 0.92.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.422-427
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• 2010

Korean Game industry, especially MMORPG(Massively Multiplayer Online Game) has been rapidly expanding in these days. But As game industry is growing, lots of online game security incidents have also been increasing and getting prevailing. One of the most critical security incidents is 'Game Bots', which are programs to play MMORPG instead of human players. If player let the game bots play for them, they can get a lot of benefic game elements (experience points, items, etc.) without any effort, and it is considered unfair to other players. Plenty of game companies try to prevent bots, but it does not work well. In this paper, we propose a behavior pattern model for detecting bots. We analyzed behaviors of human players as well as bots and identified six game features to build the model to differentiate game bots from human players. Based on these features, we made a Naive Bayesian classifier to reasoning the game bot or not. To evaluated our method, we used 10 game bot data and 6 human Player data. As a result, we classify Game bot and human player with 88% accuracy.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.11
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• pp.2866-2879
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• 2012

Among the various security threats in online games, the use of game bots is the most serious problem. Previous studies on game bot detection have proposed many methods to find out discriminable behaviors of bots from humans based on the fact that a bot's playing pattern is different from that of a human. In this paper, we look at the chatting data that reflects gamers' communication patterns and propose a communication pattern analysis framework for online game bot detection. In massive multi-user online role playing games (MMORPGs), game bots use chatting message in a different way from normal users. We derive four features; a network feature, a descriptive feature, a diversity feature and a text feature. To measure the diversity of communication patterns, we propose lightly summarized indices, which are computationally inexpensive and intuitive. For text features, we derive lexical, syntactic and semantic features from chatting contents using text mining techniques. To build the learning model for game bot detection, we test and compare three classification models: the random forest, logistic regression and lazy learning. We apply the proposed framework to AION operated by NCsoft, a leading online game company in Korea. As a result of our experiments, we found that the random forest outperforms the logistic regression and lazy learning. The model that employs the entire feature sets gives the highest performance with a precision value of 0.893 and a recall value of 0.965.