Wow it finally happened. So glad I switched to steam running on linux mint last week. I refused to install helldivers because it wanted to install some no holds barred god level permissions anti-cheat software. Windows 11 was the last straw for me. Good times…
The volunteers at the Anti-Cheat Police Department have since issued a PSA announcing, “There is currently an RCE exploit being abused in [Apex Legends]” and that it could be delivered via from the game itself, or its anti-cheat protection. “I would advise against playing any games protected by EAC or any EA titles”, they went on to say.
As for players of the tournament, they strongly recommended taking protective measures. “It is advisable that you change your Discord passwords and ensure that your emails are secure. also enable MFA for all your accounts if you have not done it yet”, they said, “perform a clean OS reinstall as soon as possible. Do not take any chances with your personal information, your PC may have been exposed to a rootkit or other malicious software that could cause further damage.”
Is Helldiver’s anti cheat that bad too? am I at least a little better off running the game through Proton on Linux or am I just providing a compatibility layer to a rootkit?
Wait who TF is cheating in HD? It’s pve?
Some people might still want to be seen as the bestest Helldiver evar.
The latter
Doesn’t the compatibility layer mean its restricted to its own wine prefix? Or am I misunderstanding?
In theory. However, wine was not designed as a security sandbox, and it might be possible (or even trivial) for something to intentionally break out of it. This gets more likely when considering the growing market share of linux.
There isn’t much sandboxing in Wine, but at least on linux, the AC is forced to run in userspace (instead of having root privileges). So it’s not quite as invasive, but it still has access to everything your non-root account has access to. Which is still a lot. Probably not much better from a privacy perspective, but at least a little better from a security perspective.
You could theoretically get around this issue by installing Steam via Flatpak so that everything is sandboxed though.