Friday 25 April 2014

Unknown console commands - Ghost mode

Here are two videos showing the use of this command, the first one from the viewpoint of the victim (VIP) and the second one from the eyes of the ghost. This is carried out using two barely-known console commands, of which only one needs to be entered every time you wish to become a ghost.



Thanks to |MYT|BaDTimE for providing the ghost video footage.

Monday 14 April 2014

Troubles with chat spam via webadmin

Do you consider double-switching annoying? Sure, it spams the chat window and makes you miss potentially vital game information. Fortunately, solution is easy - kicking or even banning the abuser. However, a more insidious way of disrupting the chat flow is out there. As primitive as it is, it is also very effective in achieving its malicious goal. It affects only servers running MarkMod and only players with admin rights and webadmins.

MarkMod broadcasts a message to these people whenever someone attempts to login via webadmin. If the attempt is unsuccessful, the message looks like: Player (WebAdmin) failed to login as webadmin followed by his IP address. Now when the attacker chooses very long name, the chat will look like this:

Too bad this message cannot be turned off. Neither you can easily ban this player, and even if you could, he can still come back via proxy. WebAdmin form also seems to miss validation of input fields for maximum length. So what's left to try? Changing webadmin port and keeping it private could hold the attacker back for a while. But without the option to switch this broadcast off implemented in the mod, all servers running it are at risk.

Saturday 5 April 2014

9th Birthday for SWAT

It's now been 9 years to the day that SWAT 4 was originally published by Vivendi Games on April 5th, 2005. That's over 3000 days of existence, which puts into perspective some people's xfire hours (10,000hrs = average 3hrs everyday for 9 years straight, assuming play started from day 1).  Unfortunately, the competitive scene is currently defunct and, excluding the latino community, there are less than ten active public servers remaining across 1.0 and 1.1. What will this number be next year?

Tuesday 1 April 2014

Buy shares in your favourite SWAT4 clan!

Are you a budding financial investor? Has it always been your dream to buy shares in a SWAT4 clan? Very few people know that there is in fact a live SWAT4 stock market, which lets you view the latest prices of stock in every major SWAT4 clan and gives you the ability to purchase shares! Access the stock market >>HERE<<.