Cheaters suck. As I’ve said countless times over the years, I have no problem with people who cheat in their own single-player games – but when they take those cheats online and ruin the fun for everybody else, they belong in a special circle of hell. There are already countless anti-cheat mechanics in place across the gamut of games, but EA’s now patented a new one.
Their new anti-cheat system will scan the contents of RAM to detect cheats or other malicious software and terminate them. The system had a patent filed last week at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
“An anti-cheat system may be accessed over a network and stored directly into volatile memory of a user computing system. In some embodiments, this anti-cheat system may scan, or access portions of, the volatile memory of the user computing system to detect whether cheat software or other unauthorized software that may interact with a game application is detected on the user computing system.”
Volatile memory is the stuff we refer to as RAM. It’s brought up a few privacy complaints, because as we know, EA doesn’t seem especially proficient at security.
“The accessed portions of the volatile memory may be compared with one or more signatures that are associated with the execution of cheat software on a computing system. The anti-cheat system may be prevented from being stored within non-volatile memory, thereby preventing malicious users from modifying the anti-cheat system”, the patent says.
It’s barely different from how existing anti-cheat programs like Punk Buster work. That also scans ram for specific signatures, and if it finds them, stops the game from running. The difference here, I think, is that EA’s anti-cheat system will actively terminate wayward applications.
Last Updated: October 8, 2019
Kromas
October 8, 2019 at 08:46
Wait Punkbuster still exists?
Geoffrey Tim
October 8, 2019 at 08:58
It does, but it’s not really used much since EA switched to its own fairfight for Battlefield.
Kromas
October 8, 2019 at 08:58
Sounds about right. Punkbuster was terrible.
Magoo マグ
October 8, 2019 at 12:17
Still auto runs on my PC. Get a little tear in my eye when come across it in my tasks occasionally.
Kromas
October 8, 2019 at 12:26
I remember before Chrome, Punkbuster and Norton AV used to compete on who consumes more RAM. Windows XP always notified you of the winner with a bsod.
Ah the simpler times.
HairyEwok
October 8, 2019 at 10:26
So you give EA access to your RAM Cache, which is interconnected with everything else on your system. Yeah sure, what could possibly go wrong here.
PoisonedBelial
October 8, 2019 at 10:55
5 years in the future:
Me – *Installs EA game*
EA Anti-Cheat – *Scanning, scanning*
Me – *Happily playing*
EA Anti-Cheat – *Illicit program detected – Shutdown initiated*
Me – *What the fuck?*
EA Anti-Cheat – *We cannot monitize Windows, please install EA OS*
Me – *Fucking what?!*
Matthew Holliday
October 8, 2019 at 11:45
EA games – Challenge everything.
Seems theyr taking their streamers a little too seriously, Shroud has been pretty vocal about cheaters in APEX, pretty much suggesting exactly this.
But it sounds like between EA, Facebook and google, there isnt much that people wont know about us.
Magoo マグ
October 8, 2019 at 12:17
That’s a bit of a stretch. EA put out applications for anti-cheat engineers in the weeks following Apex’s release, because their were a massive amount of cheaters and a huge outcry from the community. Being free to play means cheaters could just make new accounts, which they did.
If there’s just one cheater in a lobby, that ruins a match for 57 people. Seriously dude, they were everywhere. We encountered them almost every day.
HvR
October 8, 2019 at 10:07
So a remote system given direct read-write access to lowest level of the whole system memory willy-nilly terminating processes.
So much wrong with that I don’t even know where to begin
EA can f…. right off.
Kromas
October 8, 2019 at 10:16
EA can fuck right off.
Fixed it for you.