Valve has dodged what could have been a potentially nasty cheating situation for Steam users. Check Point Research found four vulnerabilities within the company’s Steam Sockets network library. The library is included as part of a networking plugin Valve offers to other studios. Had Valve not patched the vulnerabilities, Check Point claims someone could have exploited them to remotely crash your games of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2 and any other title that depends on Steam Sockets for matchmaking. In some instances, Check Point says those same vulnerabilities could have allowed someone to take over your computer remotely.
When it comes to third-party games specifically, the firm found a single vulnerability that could have allowed a hacker to take over an entire game server, and hijack the computers of everyone connected to that server.