The Battlefield 6 beta’s hacking problem shows the difficulty in playing cat and mouse with cheaters

The Battlefield 6 open beta is over, and encouraging whispers of its oo-rahhable player count – peaking at over 500,000 on PC alone, so sayeth SteamDB – have been tempered with widespread reports of invading cheaters. That’s despite BF6’s new and unusual requirement to enable Secure Boot, a BIOS-level security feature in Windows, ostensibly to prevent such do-badding.

In response, a forum post attributed to EA’s anti-cheat team has played up successes in tracking and catching the beta’s cheaters, whose crimes allegedly range from classic wallhacks, speed hacks, and aimbots to cheats that reduce recoil or display enemy health and weapon info. However, it also concedes that Secure Boot "is not, and was not intended to be a silver bullet" – and in doing so, highlights the immense, perhaps impossible task that developers have of keeping cheater users out of their games.

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