Anti-Cheat

Originally posted on March 27th 2026

by Marco “eukara” Cawthorne

You want to know about Anti-Cheat? Okay, let’s clear a few things up.

First of all - cheating itself

Cheating in videogames has always existed. Much like you could pinch your friend/sibling during a game of Pong, or put a piece of tape in the screen center to help use sniper-rifles in Counter-Strike. There’s always means of cheating in both digital and analog realms. We’re not talking cheat-codes here, but unfair sportsmanship in multiplayer games through the means of ‘enhancements’. We’re not fans of unfair players on frag-net.com!

Certain cheats are easily detectable (aim-bots, spin-bots) but others not so much. There’s people who use external tools to fight disabilities as well, and we don’t mind those. They however too can be used for cheating. There’s also people who are really, really good at a game. They are so good, they know things people below them simply don’t. In a way, that is a lot like cheating - but they’re not ‘cheaters’. We refer to them as ‘server cleaners’ instead. They make everyone leave. Imagine getting spawn-killed over and over, without even being able to fight back with basic knowledge of the game.

There’s another variant in the modern age, since online platforms have their progression tied to a virtual rank that creates the concept of ‘smurfing’. Those types purposefully have accounts with low-ranks so they get matched with inexperienced players. Imagine Gary Kasparov playing chess against babies so there’s less friction to feeling ‘powerful’.

What that establishes is the following:

• Cheating doesn’t need to involve changes to software at all (often undetectable)
• A cheater isn’t always obvious (some merely pretend to be average or slightly above average)
• A person may not intend to be cheating (tool or game malfunctioning)
• Cheating isn’t always bad, as long as nobody minds (if it is used for equalizing skill levels, see disabilities)
• Certain non-cheating behaviour can at times be worse than even cheating! (server cleaning, smurfing)

“Software Fixes Everything!”

We get it. We also played Team Fortress Classic and got annoyed by cheaters.

There’s not a single automated tool that can detect cheats with reliability. If they did, they’d have had a monopoly on such things. Various anti-cheat solution have been sold over the years. They all come and go and we don’t fault them for trying.

Most of the work is done by humans who update the means and details of their watch-dog programs. That is why they’re only effective at first. It’s a technology that fundamentally doesn’t work in solving a problem permanently.

Understanding cheating properly requires external context that the computer can’t know about (including tape on screen, input hardware modifications). No amount of kernel-level anti-cheat can detect those, much like a thermometer inside your furnace can’t tell you if it’s cold outside.

It’s resulted in a never-ending tug of war of dialing detection up & down or stuffing a neural-network into it so the engineers can delegate technical questions to… nowhere. We’ll let you know if that ever concludes!

So far, people still complain about cheaters existing in games, including those with kernel-level anti-cheat. It’s not a solved problem. That’s probably why you’re here reading this.

So how would we detect ‘cheating’? Well, you’d need something that can figure out the intrecacies of human behaviour. If the computer could merely inquire… wait a minute… how about we simply employ humans? Give people the tools to self-moderate?

Valve has been so far the only major player in that space kinda-sorta embracing it. With systems like CSGO-Overwatch and human decision making at the core (after intelligence gathering taking place over the course of a month).

Just like how a factory-line can get clogged and there’s always gotta be a human nearby to make sure nothing is going wrong… we need people.

Why companies employ Anti-Cheat

It’s a delegation of responsibility to a third-party. It can also be used as DRM, as well as a political tool. Primarily, developers/publishers don’t want to deal with the issue themselves. That much is true.

Some variants of anti-cheat are less invasive than others. We mainly oppose kernel-level anti-cheat, because no company exists that has earned that level of trust in us that’d have us running their modules inside our kernel. However, others aren’t without sin.

Will a game ever remove Anti-Cheat?

Usually goes against their incentives. As stated, many developers want to wash their hands of responsibility. It’s a giant management burden on them.

The alternative is designing something in mind to be moderated. Games can need to be designed from the get-go to be supervised by the people who play them. It’s a design problem.

Real-time games often have voting systems to help with moderation. Unfortunately those aren’t as common as they used to, much like dedicated servers used to be everywhere (you might radicalize yourself looking into the latter).

Is all Anti-Cheat bad?

Even VAC, which seems innocent compared to the other approaches will do pretty invasive things. It doesn’t have any kernel-level priviledges, but it scans your memory and DNS-cache/browing-history.

That alone is very scary, but other anti-cheat software are engineered like rootkits. They hide what they are and what they do by design. They can open network connections without you even knowing. That too is an attack vector that can be exploited. Not just from your machine, but also within the companies. If I was a bad actor, I know what type of software I’d infiltrate. One that’s distributed to millions of people, running in the kernel.

In short: That form of anti-cheat is incredibly invasive, a security risk and a privacy risk. We should never give up control like that. It’s invasive and doesn’t actually help that much. We can understand a basic watchdog running during the game checking for the usual tampering - but this type of access is a nuclear option. The anti-cheat software literally has more control over the computers its functions than you while playing the game.

What can players do?

It’s okay to say ‘no’ to a game if you deem it too invasive for you. We need to quit normalizing this invasive behaviour, that we should simply be at-ease with the amount of control companies are themselves choosing to have over your computer. All that ultimately for an unattainable goal…

You would think that some big breakthrough would have come in almost 30 years of tackling this problem. But no, there hasn’t! Even Valve tries to automate the bulk with neural networks (it is however, slow and the accuracy is impossible for us to determine). Which is kinda acknowledging that a human being, not a fixed program, might be the best fit to solve these issues anyway. But that’s not all.

Incentives, dynamics matter

Because the industry decided to police their playerbase, it has created some rifts between developers and players. Because some people get wrongfully banned, innocent people get burned and frustrated with the people making the game - instead of at each other. Valve practically had to give them free games to keep the heat low. Give people the tools and the ability to self-govern and you would not have that result at all.

The industry keeps creating power structures in which the players are perceived as a potential enemy, instead of as a helper. They used to have this when developers were more hands-on with the modding community and they helped each-other out.

Anonymous: XYZ tool is really necessary. In ABC game that’s using it it got rid of this really pesky player that was bothering dozens of people

You had dozens of people grapple with a bad player, could do nothing about it (by design), then cheered the automaton on when it finally kicked in?

Is anyone supposed to be impressed or feel helped by this? We can do better.

EOF