Games giant Electronic Arts launched an open beta over the weekend for its upcoming first-person shooter Battlefield 6 and — almost immediately — the game was swamped with cheaters.
Soon after the game’s launch, countless players complained online about encountering cheaters. In response, a member of Electronic Arts’ anti-cheat team, who goes by AC, wrote in an official forum that the company saw players report 104,000 “instances of potential cheaters” over the first two days of the game’s being online, and that it stopped 330,000 “attempts to cheat or tamper with anti-cheat controls.”
Like many videogames today, such as Valorant, Electronic Arts uses a kernel-level anti-cheat system called Javelin, which means the system has the highest possible privileges on the computer. This allows it to monitor everything that happens on the machine with the goal of catching cheats, which are often running in the background and disguised as some other program.
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In their post, AC admitted that this system is not a guarantee that there will be no cheaters. AC also referred to the fact that the game enforces Secure Boot, a Windows hardware-based security feature.
“On Secure Boot, I want to be clear that Secure Boot is not, and was not intended to be a silver bullet,” AC wrote. “Secure Boot is how you’re helping us build up our arsenal. It’s another barrier that helps us make it harder for cheat developers to create cheat programs, and makes it easier for us to detect it when they do.”
“Anti-Cheat isn’t one and done, it’s an ever evolving battlefield, and what has worked for us previously or in different games doesn’t always work in all of them,” AC added.
An Electronic Arts spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company has no updated information on the numbers of players who were banned.
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Cheaters or game hackers are a problem for every online video game. In recent times, companies like Riot Games, makers of Valorant, and Activision, the makers of the Call of Duty series, among others, have launched kernel-level anti-cheat systems.
Philippe Koskinas, the director and head of anti-cheat for Riot Games, told TechCrunch earlier this year, there are several ways in which his anti-cheat system goes after cheaters, as well as cheat makers and sellers. Those include banning cheaters, taking advantage of Windows’ own security features to limit where cheats can run, fingerprinting cheaters’ hardware so they can’t just create a new fresh account to cheat with, and even infiltrating cheat communities on Discord or Telegram.
