How do LAN tournaments actually catch audio/footstep cheats?

[Chloe Perez]

I’ve been running local CS tournaments for a couple of years now and the one thing that keeps me up at night is the old-school audio radar cheats. You know the ones—guy plugs in a mic, runs some software that spikes up when someone’s footsteps hit the mics, and it works fine on low-tickrate public servers. The problem is these things are basically invisible during a match because they don’t touch the game client at all, they just listen to your speakers. I’ve seen guys deny it hard until the refs literally pulled the audio capture off their rig.

I’ve been reading up on how big events actually stop this stuff and it sounds insane—kernel drivers, encrypted game traffic, all that. But I genuinely don’t understand the mechanics of how they catch someone using a footstep cheat in real time. Is it really the audio that gives them away, or is it more about monitoring what’s running? And does encrypting the network packets even matter for an audio cheat that never talks to the server? Just trying to get my head around it before our regionals next month.

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