Anti-Cheat Countermeasures in the Holiday Puzzle by inazar, journal
Anti-Cheat Countermeasures in the Holiday Puzzle
The following information has been declassified from the DeviantArt Code Archive, after the decommissioning of the Holiday Puzzle. Back in the mists of time (or "2011") DA's annual Holiday Extravaganza sale needed a little sprucing up, so we came up with the idea of a simple Threes-alike puzzle game: click on groups of three or more Christmas-themed items, and they'd clear from the screen. Clear as much as you could, and the screen would refill as you moved up a level; cross a threshold with your final score, and get a discount code to use in the shop against prints and DevWear (yes, we once had merch too). As it turned out, the promise of a discount brought out some of the more devious deviants, and they started finding ways to get at the codes without going to the trouble of playing the game... Countermeasure I: Server-side Vouchers Very quickly we found out that an enterprising person, learning that this game provided discount codes, could simply read through the source code of