• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.31 no.6
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• pp.1097-1104
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• 2021

Online game-bots are already known for a lot of persons by various ways. It leads to problems such as declining game player's interest, in-game financial crisis, etc. Detecting and restricting of game-bot is now essential. Because both publishers and players get disadvantages from their long term abnormal working. But it is not easy to restrict, because of false restriction risks. Game publishers need to distinguish game-bot from server-side game logs. At last, it should can make reasons for game-bot restriction. In this paper, we classified game-bot users by using daily separated game logs for testing data. For daily-driven detection, we separated total dataset into one day logs. Preliminary detects game-bots with one day logs, and determines total results by using these data. Daily driven detection advantages on detection which contains combined game playing style. Which shows like normal user and game-bot. These methodology shows better F1-score, which one of indicator which demonstrate classification accuracy. It increases from 0.898 to 0.945 by using Random Forest classifier.

• Journal of Korea Game Society
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.69-78
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• 2015

As the online game industry has been growing rapidly, more and more malicious activities to gain economic benefits have been reported as well. Game bot is one of the biggest problems in the online game industry. So we proposed a bot detection method based on the ERG theory of motivation for the first time. Most of the previous studies focused on behavior-based detection by monitoring patterns of the specific actions. In this paper, we applied the motivation theory to analyze user behaviors on a real game dataset. The result shows that normal users in the game followed the ERG theory of motivation in the same way as it works in real world. But in the case of game bots, the theory could not be applied because the game bot has specific reasons, unlike normal game users. We applied the ERG theory to users to distinguish game bot users from normal users. We detected the game bot with high accuracy of 99.78% by applying the theory.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.225-238
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• 2012

Among the various security threats in online games, the use of game bots is the most serious problem. In this paper, we propose a framework for user behavior analysis for bot detection in online games. Specifically, we focus on party play that reflects the social activities of gamers: In a Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), party play log includes a distinguished information that can classify game users under normal-user and abnormal-user. That is because the bot users' main activities target on the acquisition of cyber assets. Through a statistical analysis of user behaviors in game activity logs, we establish the threshold levels of the activities that allow us to identify game bots. Also, we build a knowledge base of detection rules based on this statistical analysis. We apply these rule reasoner to the sixth most popular online game in the world. As a result, we can detect game bot users with a high accuracy rate of 95.92%.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.93-107
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• 2016

Game bot playing is one of the main risks in Massively Multi-Online Role Playing Games(MMORPG) because it damages overall game playing environment, especially the balance of the in-game economy. There have been many studies to detect game bot. However, the previous detection models require continuous maintenance efforts to train and learn the game bots' patterns whenever the game contents change. In this work, we have proposed a machine learning technique using the self-similarity property that is an intrinsic attribute in game bots and automated maintenance system. We have tested our method and implemented a system to major three commercial games in South Korea. As a result, our proposed system can detect and classify game bots with high accuracy.

• 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 Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.25 no.5
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• pp.1131-1141
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• 2015

In this paper, we proposed a new approach of machine learning based method for detecting game-bots from normal players in MMORPG by inspecting the player's action log data especially in-game money increasing/decreasing event log data. DBSCAN (Density Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise), an one of density based clustering algorithms, is used to extract the attributes of spatial characteristics of each players such as a number of clusters, a ratio of core points, member points and noise points. Most of all, even game-bot developers know principles of this detection system, they cannot avoid the system because moving a wide area to hunt the monster is very inefficient and unproductive. As the result, game-bots show definite differences from normal players in spatial characteristics such as very low ratio, less than 5%, of noise points while normal player's ratio of noise points is high. In experiments on real action log data of MMORPG, our game-bot detection system shows a good performance with high game-bot detection accuracy.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.1415-1425
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• 2018

MMORPG genre is based on the belief that all users in virtual world are equal. All users are able to obtain the corresponding wealth or status as they strive under the same resource, time. However, game bot is the main factor for harming this fair competition, causing benign gamers to feel a relative deprivation and deviate from the game. Game bots mainly form GFG(Gold Farming Group), which collects the goods in the game indiscriminately and adversely affects the economic system of the game. A general game bot detection algorithm is useful for detecting each bot, but it only covers few portions of GFG, not the whole, so it needs a wider range of detecting method. In this paper, we propose a method of detecting GFG based on items used in MMORPG genre. Several items that are mainly traded in the game were selected and the flows of those items were represented by a network. We Identified the characteristics of exchanging items of GFG bots and can identify the GFG's item trade network with real datasets from one of the popular online games.