Is AION2 Status safe to use with AION 2?

What the plugin never does

AION 2 is protected by the NCGuard anti-cheat, so the plugin is built to be invisible to the game:

• No access to the game process. It doesn't read or write game memory, inject DLLs or hook rendering. The overlay is an ordinary Windows window drawn on top.
• No key presses. No macros, no auto-clicking, nothing sent to the game window. The “to chat” button only copies a line to your clipboard — you paste it yourself: Enter → Ctrl+V → Enter.
• No input hooks. There are no global keyboard or mouse hooks. The plugin only checks whether Shift is held during its own actions — “Shift + wheel” changes map opacity, for example. Nothing is logged.
• No focus stealing. Clicking the panel doesn't pull the keyboard away from the game, and once a menu closes the game is back in front.
• No changes to game files, and no admin rights.

What it actually does

To show your server's status the plugin needs two things: whether you're in the world, and which server the game is connected to. It gets them by:

• reading the last line of the game's *.breadcrumb.log — opened read-only;
• looking at the output of the standard Windows netstat command to see which address the AION2 process is talking to.

The only network traffic is:

• an empty TCP connect to the game server, with zero bytes of data — every 30 seconds normally, every 6 seconds while the server is starting up;
• a ping to your server once a second while ping is on screen;
• public feeds: NC and Steam maintenance notices, Steam player count, the shugo.gg event schedule and live field boss timers from aion2timers.com;
• an update check every 12 hours.

No cookies and no identifiers — just the plugin version in the User-Agent header. Every address and interval is listed in the docs folder on GitHub.

Updates never install themselves. The plugin only fetches a short manifest signed with our key (ECDSA P-256); without a valid signature nothing happens. The new exe is downloaded only after you click “Update”, only over https from GitHub or our own site, and its SHA-256 is checked before anything is replaced.

What's stored on your PC

Nothing is installed system-wide. The plugin only writes to the current user's profile:

The Premium key is verified offline inside the plugin. It's tied to a device code — 8 bytes of a SHA-256 hash of the Windows MachineGuid. The GUID itself never leaves your PC, and the code reaches the bot only when you click “Buy in Telegram”. More in the privacy policy.

AION 2 mods and ban risk

When people say “AION 2 mods” they usually mean modified client files, DLLs injected into the game, memory readers, macros or auto-clickers. All of them tamper with the game itself — which is exactly what anti-cheat is there to catch, and what gets accounts banned in online games.

AION2 Status works differently. It gets its data from public sources — NC notices, Steam and player-run feeds — not from the game, and shows it in its own window, like a browser sitting on top of the game. Why “plugin”, “addon” and “overlay” all mean the same thing here is covered on the home page.

To be straight with you: no third-party tool can guarantee you won't be banned. What we can do is show exactly what AION2 Status does and doesn't do — and you can check it yourself with the steps below.

Why Windows shows a blue SmartScreen window

On first launch Windows may say “Windows protected your PC”. That's SmartScreen. It trusts files by reputation — how often they've been downloaded and whether they carry a paid code-signing certificate. The plugin doesn't have one yet, so Windows greets it the same way it greets any new exe.

Click “More info” → “Run anyway”. If you'd like to confirm it's the genuine file first, check the hash — it takes a minute.

Check the file yourself

Only download the plugin from this site or from the Releases page on GitHub. The hashes below are computed at build time from the very zip the Download button serves.

Compute the SHA-256 on your side: open PowerShell in the folder with the file and run

Get-FileHash .\AION2-Status.zip -Algorithm SHA256

The result must match the table. If it doesn't, don't run the file — tell us via the bot.

VirusTotal

The “report” link opens a scan of the file by dozens of antivirus engines. A brand-new unsigned exe sometimes picks up 1–2 heuristic flags out of ~70 — it happens with small tools. Look at the major engines: Microsoft Defender, Kaspersky, ESET, Dr.Web. If VirusTotal says the file hasn't been scanned yet, upload it yourself — it's free.

Behaviour

You can confirm the plugin does only what's described here with free Microsoft Sysinternals tools:

• TCPView — which connections AION2-Status.exe opens;
• Process Monitor — where it writes: only HKCU\Software\Aion2Status and %APPDATA%\Aion2Status;
• Process Explorer — AION2.exe's DLLs tab shows nothing from the plugin.

Open code

The code that shows how the plugin deals with the network, the game and your PC is public on GitHub: server probes, ping, server detection, the overlay windows and the device code. The rest stays closed so nobody can re-release the plugin under another name. What changed between versions is in the changelog.

Found a vulnerability? Please don't open a public issue — message the bot privately: /support security: what you found.