By Elise Murphy – Sr. Director, Game Security & Anti-Cheat

At Electronic Arts we are committed to creating a safe and fair experience for all of our players. As outlined in our Positive Player Charter, we ask everyone to play within the rules of the game and refrain from tampering or using cheats. Our Game Security & Anti-Cheat team has been hard at work building and supporting technologies that enable us to best protect our players’ interest in fair play, and that’s why we are announcing the launch of EA anticheat with FIFA 23 for PC this fall. 

EA anti-cheat is a kernel-mode anti-cheat and anti-tamper solution developed in-house at Electronic Arts. PC cheat developers have increasingly moved into the kernel, so we need to have kernel-mode protections to ensure fair play and tackle PC cheat developers on an even playing field. 

As tech-inclined video gamers ourselves, it is important to us to make sure that any kernel anti-cheat included in our games acts with a strong focus on the privacy and security of our gamers that use a PC. 

Third party anti-cheat solutions are often opaque to our teams, and prevent us from implementing additional privacy controls or customizations that provide greater accuracy and granularity for EA-specific game modes. With EA anticheat we have full stack ownership of the security & privacy posture, so we can fix security issues as soon as they may arise. With that in mind, let’s tackle a few of the common questions you may have.

FAQ

Why is kernel level anti-cheat needed? 

This varies on a game-by-game basis. For games that are highly competitive and contain many online modes like FIFA 23, kernel-mode protection is absolutely vital. 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 ke