The news was announced by the publisher on its official blog. As outlined by EA’s Sr. Director of Game Security & Anti-Cheat, Elise Murphy, EA AntiCheat is a kernel-mode anti-cheat and anti-tamper solution that offers kernel-mode protections. “For games that are highly competitive and contain many online modes like FIFA 23, kernel-mode protection is absolutely vital”, Murphy explains in her blog post. “When cheat programs operate in kernel space, they can make their cheat functionally invisible to anti-cheat solutions that live in user-mode. Unfortunately, the last few years have seen a large increase in cheats and cheat techniques operating in kernel-mode, so the only reliable way to detect and block these is to have our anti-cheat operate there as well.” Going forward, not all EA games will implement EAAC, and according to Murphy, EA is working with its game studios to determine the needs for each project. “Depending on the title and type of game, we may implement other anti-cheat technology, such as user-mode protections, or even forgo leveraging anticheat technology altogether in some cases, opting instead to design the game to be resilient against certain types of cheats.” According to Murphy, EA’s new anti-cheat solution will only be active when a title with EAAC is running, and all anti-cheat processes will shut down when the game does. Also, EAAC will automatically uninstall from a user’s PC once all EA games using EAAC are uninstalled. While users are also able to uninstall EAAC at any time, EA titles using the new anti-cheat solution will not be playable. As for player privacy, EA promises that this is a top concern for the Game Security & Anti-Cheat team. Player privacy is a top concern of our Game Security & Anti-Cheat team - after all, we’re players as well! EAAC will only look at what it needs to for anti-cheat purposes in our games and we have limited the information EAAC collects. If you have a process on your PC that is trying to interact with our game, EAAC could see that and respond. However, everything else is off limits. EAAC does not gather any information about your browsing history, applications that are not connected to EA games, or anything that is not directly related to anti-cheat protection. We’ve worked with independent, 3rd party computer security and privacy services firms to ensure EAAC operates with data privacy top of mind. For the information that EACC does collect, we strive to maintain privacy where possible through a cryptographic process called hashing to create unique identifiers and discard the original information
