Fighting for Fairness: Anti-Cheat Progress Report

By Elise Murphy, Head of Game Security

Summary:

• EA Javelin Anticheat has blocked over 33 million cheat attempts across 2.2 billion PC gaming sessions since launch.
• Now active in 14 EA titles, including Battlefield, Madden, and EA SPORTS FC franchises.
• Built by experts in security, data, and game development to detect and stop cheating in all its forms.
• Fair play is up—cheater presence in Battlefield 2042 matches was cut in half after recent updates.

Here at EA, we inspire the world to play - but nothing ruins the fun of a game quite like cheating does. Our goal is to secure our games, prevent and detect all forms of cheating that could spoil the gaming experience. We’ve had our heads down working on our anti-cheat program for the last few years and are excited to share what we’ve accomplished to-date. 

Originally launched in September 2022 in FIFA 23, our flagship anti-cheat product prevents, identifies, and addresses cheating activity. Since its launch, over 28 million PC players have enjoyed fair play in over 2.2 billion PC gaming sessions across EA SPORTS FC™, EA SPORTS™ Madden NFL, Battlefield™, F1®, EA SPORTS™ WRC, and Plants vs. Zombies franchises™. The solution has prevented over 33 million attempts to cheat and, in combination with our studio partners, we’ve permanently banned thousands of cheater accounts in 14 EA games!

Today, we are reconfirming our commitment to fair play by introducing the EA Javelin Anticheat brand. This brand was carefully chosen to communicate the core attributes of the solution: defense, strength, and agility. We also want to provide more transparency around our anti-cheat efforts here at EA, so consider this the first of a regular set of articles and deep dives we’ll be publishing.

A team effort

To create and operate an anti-cheat program at this scale requires a talented team that is up to the challenge. The anti-cheat team itself is made up of three primary units:

• EA Javelin Anticheat technology is built and maintained by a development team of superstar security & software engineers who have expertise ranging from vulnerability research to kernel development to game development. 
• Our incredible operations team consists of analysts and reverse engineers who perform investigations, issue cheating enforcements, and review our anti-cheat technology regularly to provide feedback on how we can improve. 
• Supporting all of this is our fantastic, multi-faceted data team consisting of data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists. They provide key insights on how effective our anti-cheat efforts are, build and maintain advanced machine learning and AI models, and enable us to scale our anti-cheat efforts across the wide variety of game genres and franchises we support.

A critical part of what makes our anti-cheat efforts successful is our extensive network of partners from across EA. Together, these teams bring a unique lens that helps ensure we’re taking the right actions, at the right times, to create the best possible experience for players. 

Tackling cheating in all its forms

On a practical level, different genres have different types of cheats. Shooters famously have aimbots and triggerbots that help cheaters land accurate shots without effort or skill, and wallhacks or “extra sensory perception” (ESP) abilities, which lets a cheater see through walls, locate loot, or even see the location and health status of enemy players. In a game like EA SPORTS FC™, a cheat might try to fake match information to gain an instant win. These are just a few examples. Analyzing and reacting to cheats as they emerge is one of the things that make our jobs so interesting - cheat developers can be pretty creative, so we have to be, too. 

On a technical level, cheats can be grouped into two main categories - internal and external. This has to do with whether the cheat is injecting code into the game process or simply reading and doing actions outside of the game. Both of these types of cheats can severely impact game fairness. Pixel-bots are an example of an external cheat, and they can be effective as aimbots by just reading the screen, while internal cheats can manipulate game data to change anything that isn’t directly protected by the game server. EA Javelin Anticheat is built to protect against both of these, with hundreds of specific detections, more generic telemetry signals, and a variety of other protections to block cheats from being able to do anything at all.

Kernel-level anticheat

You may have heard of “kernel-level anti-cheat.” Like many other products in the anti-cheat space, EA Javelin Anticheat operates in the kernel by necessity. Because external cheats don't interact with the game process itself, they can easily evade many anti-cheat techniques, especially if they do things from the kernel. The kernel is the deepest part of the operating system, and if cheats operate from there while the anti-cheat does not, they can hide everything they are doing with no chance for us to detect or prevent any of it. While having a kernel driver is essential to protecting fair play in our games, we also understand the concerns that a kernel driver can raise. EA Javelin Anticheat only runs when one of our protected games is running, and it will uninstall itself if you have uninstalled all of your EA games that have EA Javelin Anticheat protection. We have partnered closely with internal teams and 3rd party assessors to validate that EA Javelin Anticheat will only inspect what it needs to for anti-cheat purposes… everything else is off-limits. 

Measuring impact

Cheats can attack game security in lots of different ways and we have all these tools and capabilities built to stop them, but how do we know if we’re actually making a difference and protecting our players' right to fair play?

A straightforward way to know how fair our games are is to assess the number of matches found with cheaters and see how many games they played with other players. With some analysis, we can come up with a measure of how often a regular player would see a cheater in their games on average. We call this the Match Infection Rate and it’s a looking-back metric that helps us understand if the enforcements we issued resulted in more matches with fair play preserved. This is a good way to measure how much we’re cleaning up our games over time. 

Last Fall, we introduced new features to EA Javelin Anticheat and rolled them out to Battlefield 2042, which resulted in that Match Infection Rate being roughly cut in half. The team introduced these features slowly in order to prevent false positives. There will always be a difference between the total number of players we think could be cheating, and the amount we actually take enforcement against with high confidence. We take player disputes very seriously as we never want to impact a legitimate player’s ability to play one of our games.  We’ve maintained an accuracy rate of over 99% when banning cheaters, and we have overturned enforcements where investigation indicated that enforcement wasn’t warranted.

A less obvious metric is the effect our work has on the cheat marketplace. If our work makes it harder and more time-consuming to develop and support a working cheat, the availability of that cheat will be lower and the price likely will go up. Frustrated cheaters may quit cheating, quit playing, or go to some other game with more accessible cheats.

We are incredibly proud of the progress we’ve made, but we know our work isn’t done. We're excited to continue to deliver on our mission of ensuring EA’s PC player community has fair and fun experiences in our games. Stay tuned - we’ll be sharing updates on our anti-cheat efforts more often going forward.

Until then, keep it fun & keep it fair!