Image: Activision
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.
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"Dear cheaters," the tweet read. "Cheaters aren't welcome. There's no tolerance for cheaters, and soon you'll know what we mean." Activision is not the first company to turn to kernel-level anti-cheat systems to combat cheaters. In 2020, Riot Games launched a kernel-level anti-cheat system called Vanguard (not to be confused with the upcoming Call of Duty game of the same name), that was designed to detect cheats in the company's online shooter Valorant. At the time, security experts, as well as some players, worried that the system was too invasive, and that it was effectively a surveillance system designed to run at all times, even when the game wasn't running. Riot later changed this and allowed users to disable Vanguard when not playing Valorant, and the system is considered to be largely successful at combating cheaters.Activision said that its RICOCHET anti-cheat system "will only operate when you play on PC.""The driver is not always-on. The software turns on when you start Call of Duty: Warzone and shuts down when you close the game," the blog post read. " Plus, the kernel-level driver only monitors and reports activity related to Call of Duty. "
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People who have worked to secure games and fight cheaters have no doubt that a kernel-level anti-cheat system is the best way to win the endless cat-and-mouse game between video game developers and cheat developers. "As companies assess the cheating landscape they notice that cheat devs are becoming more sophisticated and it's now common for cheats to have kernel components and those cheats are becoming more difficult to address without also being in the kernel," Paul Chamberlain, who led Riot’s anti-cheat team and and the development of Vanguard, told Motherboard in an online chat. Moreover, Chamberlain added, players accept and have gotten more used to these kinds of anti-cheat systems, thanks to Vanguard and others such as Easy Anti-Cheat and Battleye. "I think companies are taking cheating more seriously and are willing to invest more resources into the problem and so they are less intimidated by more sophisticated technologies like kernel drivers," Chamberlain concluded. "This can happen when you start hiring more dedicated anti-cheat staff because the programmer you already have will be much more comfortable working with game code in user mode while anti-cheat specialists are more likely to have familiarity with kernel development and so are more likely to be comfortable recommending it to decision makers."Do you develop cheats for games or reverse engineer anti-cheat software? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, Wire/Wickr @lorenzofb, or email lorenzofb@vice.com.
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