Valve Anti-Cheat

Stub

This article or section is a stub. You can help by expanding it.

Valve Anti-Cheat, more commonly known by its acronym VAC, is a proprietary anti-cheat system developed by Valve for use in both GoldSrc and Source multiplayer games.

Heuristics

When a player is connected to a VAC-secured server (denoted by a security badge and the letter V in the server browser), the VAC system checks if any foreign processes are hooked into the player's local game binaries. If the VAC check finds a positive ID for any possible cheating tool, the offending player's Steam account is then permanently banned from all VAC-secured servers after a variable amount of time.

Message displayed to a VAC-banned client.

Valve Anti-Cheat will not detect content hacks such as invisible wall textures or bright-colored player models. Server admins that wish to block such activity will need to run a pure server.

Using VAC in your Mod

All multiplayer mods will automatically support Valve Anti-Cheat, as it is a core element in the Source engine.