How EA is fighting back against cheaters

Sponsored by

Your AI strategy has a security problem: 43% of IT leaders now cite security concerns as the top barrier to expanding AI agent deployment, according to research from JumpCloud. Before giving agents more access to apps, data, and workflows, make sure you can govern the identities behind them. See how to secure every identity, human or not.

Cheaters never prosper—especially not if the engineers at video game company Electronic Arts (EA) have anything to say about it.

It’s never a dull day for EA CISO and SVP of Security Engineering Mike Reavey, whose job entails not only keeping hackers away, but ensuring games remain fun and fair for players.

“There’s not a lot of other industries where you have to do things like fight cheaters and try and keep the experience super fair,” Reavey told IT Brew.

Cheat code. That mission often means defending against the cheating ecosystem, which has a sophisticated business model and resources like customer support and advertising to support it.

“There’s a real commercial enterprise at play here that we’re up against. It’s no longer the left-right, left-right kind of fun cheats,” Reavey said.

There are several different types of cheats in the gaming industry. “There’s the kind that are pretty much the domain of PC games, where you have some software that you install on your PC [and] it tries to modify the way the game works for you, so you have an advantage over everybody else,” Reavey said. He added there are also hardware cheats, which include elements like modded controllers and keyboards.

Attackers fund cheat development in a variety of ways, including using infostealers to steal and sell gaming credentials.

“One of the account types that [attackers] love is gaming accounts because they can go in and take whatever they’ve got and then they can use that to do all kinds of things that can make it unfun for the players,” Reavey said. “It can go from taking that account and selling it. It can go to taking that account and using it as a buying account to go grind out to earn some currencies and go sell the currencies for real money.”

But wait, there’s more! Cheating isn’t the only threat confronting the video game industry. In May, IT Brew spoke with the CISO of XBOX, who said the very same players game companies are trying to protect can also be adversarial. For example, a player may execute an account takeover and sell the victim’s account or disrupt online gameplay with a DDoS attack.

“Usually you don’t find a Bank of America customer trying to take down their home bank customer account,” Temi Adebambo said. “But you find that in gaming.”

EA’s solution to in-game cheating. EA is attempting to disrupt the budding cheating ecosystem with the help of EA Javelin Anticheat, a proprietary kernel-level anti-cheat software that launches before a game begins, and detects when a player is trying to modify the game in any way.

“The game won’t start unless Javelin is running, and when Javelin is running, it’s watching the game and the processes around the game, the memory, and all the things that the computer loads,” Reavey said. “And it says, ‘Did any of this change from what we expected it to be?’ Because if it changed, then it’s probably a cheat.”

Reavey said Javelin, which has been around since 2022, not only allows EA to better understand the cheats themselves and how cheaters think, but also try and disrupt the business around cheating.

“We can [influence] that customer sentiment back to the cheat developer and cause them customer pain,” Reavey said. “And by causing them customer pain, they may lose customers and decide this isn’t a game I want to cheat because my customers are getting too upset with all the times that the anti-cheat stops them, and so they go focus on something else.”

In it for the long run. Javelin currently supports 20 gaming titles in EA’s portfolio.

“The portfolio that Java supports is kind of surprising. There’s the core shooters that you would expect and then we even help protect some of the Plants vs. Zombies stuff,” Reavey said. “It’s just wherever there’s bad actors. If we can help, we’re gonna be there.”

He added EA is constantly examining which titles may be “prone to attracting cheaters” for opportunities to leverage Javelin. According to EA’s latest Anti-Cheat Progress report, Javelin has reportedly blocked more than 26.7 million cheat attempts in the past year, with an over 99% accuracy rate for cheat detection.

Despite its success, Reavey said addressing cheating is, and will continue to be, a long-term battle.

“Cheating is not one of those things where you’re going to be done. There’s not going to be a day that we wake up and say, ‘Well, we’ve solved cheating,’” Reavey said. “Cheating is a cat-and-mouse game…We’re always going to have to be there to make sure that when it’s really disruptive to other people, that we’re there to stop it.”