What's the Deal With Anti-Cheat Software in Online Games?
1What's the Deal With Anti-Cheat Software in Online Games?
In the past decade, big competitive online games, especially first-person shooters like Activision-Blizzard’s Call of Duty and Bungie’s Destiny 2, have had to massively scale up their operations to combat the booming business of cheat sellers.
But an increasingly vocal subset of gamers is concerned that the software meant to detect and ban cheaters has become overly broad and invasive, posing a considerable threat to their privacy and system integrity.
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At issue are kernel-level drivers, a relatively new escalation against cheat makers.
The kernel itself—sometimes called “ring 0”—is a sequestered portion of a computer, where the core functionality of the machine runs.
Software in this region includes the operating system, the drivers that talk to hardware—like keyboards, mice, and the video card—as well as software that requires high-level permissions, like antivirus suites.