"Battlefield 6": EA Satisfied with Fight Against Cheaters

In a blog post, EA Dice reports successes in the fight against cheaters in "Battlefield 6". The team writes in the post that 2.39 million cheat attempts have since been fended off in the online shooter.

The Match Infection Rate, i.e., the percentage of rounds in which a cheater is playing, was around 2 percent at launch. EA considers this a great success: Conversely, the statistic means that 98 percent of all matches take place without cheaters. Over the weeks, the Match Infection Rate fluctuated somewhat within the framework of a cat-and-mouse game between EA and the developers of cheat tools, but according to an EA graphic, it never reached 4 percent.

Fighting Cheaters with Secure Boot

Over 1 million cheat attempts were already prevented during the open beta of "Battlefield 6", EA writes. In the fight against cheaters, "Battlefield 6" relies on Secure Boot: Secure Boot is a prerequisite for starting the program. UEFI Secure Boot is a security measure that must be activated in the BIOS. It is intended to protect against so-called bootkits – malware variants that nest in the bootloader and thus start before the operating system. Malware installed in this way is particularly difficult for security software to detect. Cheat programs can also exploit this mechanism.

Such anti-cheat measures are not undisputed because they intervene deeply in the system and exclude some players. For example, "Battlefield 6" runs natively exclusively on Windows – Linux and macOS are not supported. However, for the developers, this is better than the alternative: if cheaters have too much freedom, it can spoil the fun for other players and cause servers to die out. According to the developers, the online shooter "The Cycle" had to be shut down after the dominance of cheaters emptied the servers..

(dahe)