Le rapport d’Activision sur l’économie de la triche cite le matériel DMA : ce que cette vision de marché signifie pour les défenseurs

For most of gaming history, cheating was framed as a personal failing: one player, one aimbot, one ban. September 2026 made it clear that at least one major publisher no longer sees it that way. In a run of announcements ahead of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launch, Activision described cheating as an organized, multi-billion-dollar market with suppliers, resellers, account farms, and evasion services, and explicitly listed DMA-based cheating hardware among the products fueling it.

For a brand like Cyber Ammo, which sells DMA hardware for security research, education, and anti-cheat hardening, that is worth reading carefully. The same class of PCIe hardware that helps defenders test memory-integrity assumptions in a lab is being named by a publisher as part of a cheat supply chain. How the industry draws that line, and why, matters to everyone who works with this equipment legitimately.

What Activision actually said

According to Dexerto’s September 21 coverage of a Call of Duty post published on September 18, Activision described a marketplace of resellers, subscription services, cheat reskins, illicit accounts, spoofing tools, and distribution networks. The publisher cited analysis from threat intelligence firm Intorqa, which, as reported by TechSpot on September 22, estimates the global cheat economy at somewhere between 5.1 and 13.8 billion dollars per year, with a median figure of roughly 8.5 billion.

TechSpot’s summary breaks that estimate into two streams:

• Subscription software: cheat subscriptions for just 15 popular titles reportedly generate around 3.5 billion dollars a year.
• Supporting services: account trading, boosting, hardware ID spoofers, and related tools add at least another 5 billion.

Activision also shared enforcement figures that appear in both reports: more than 375 reseller operations disrupted, over 80 cease-and-desist demands issued, and 31 primary cheat vendors shut down. According to TechSpot, the company’s list of cheating tools included aimbots, wallhacks, unlock tools, DMA-based cheating hardware, and external input devices, alongside a strong focus on stolen and replacement accounts.

Treat the dollar figures as a vendor estimate rather than audited fact. Intorqa’s own range is wide, and a publisher has obvious reasons to stress how big the problem is. The structural claim is the more useful part: cheating is a supply chain, and each link in it can be disrupted.

Legal pressure as a detection layer

The market framing lines up with Activision’s legal activity. As GameRiv reported on September 5, the Call of Duty account announced on September 4 that the developers behind the Zenith and Devware cheats had permanently shut down their services and apologized to the community. That followed a lawsuit Activision filed on February 6, 2026, in the Central District of California, which included claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The complaint reportedly alleged that close to 28,400 licenses had been sold.

That is not new territory for the publisher. Dexerto notes that a 2024 judgment ordered EngineOwning to pay Activision more than 14 million dollars after litigation that began in 2022. What has changed is the tempo and the public messaging. Activision now presents legal action as one layer of a stack. TechSpot describes it as combining detection, account security, TPM 2.0 enforcement, deep investigations, and legal work, with each layer aimed at a different pillar of the market: the cheats themselves, replacement accounts, and evasion tools.

Hardware bans and the “judged by behavior” principle

Late September added a hardware angle. GosuGamers reported that Team RICOCHET announced more than 70,000 new hardware bans, which will carry into Modern Warfare 4 at launch. TechSpot dates those bans to August. The same update said roughly 5,000 accounts had been banned for using input-modifying devices, with products such as Cronus Zen and XIM Matrix named directly.

One line from that update deserves attention beyond Call of Duty. Activision noted that some of these devices are marketed as accessibility tools, and said it judges them by what they do in a match, not by what they are called or how they are sold. The team also said its enforcement extends to distributors, pointing to a cease-and-desist served on a North American distributor the previous year.

That principle cuts both ways, and it is a healthy one. It means:

1. Owning a category of hardware is not the offense. Using it to gain an unfair advantage in a live match is.
2. Marketing language is not a shield. A product sold with a respectable label but used to cheat still gets treated as cheating hardware.
3. Context and behavior are what count. That is also the right way to think about DMA hardware.

Why this matters for legitimate DMA work

DMA-capable PCIe devices have a long, legitimate history in forensics, firmware development, driver testing, and security research. Anyone who has studied IOMMU configuration, Kernel DMA Protection, or memory-integrity checks knows that defenders need realistic hardware to test their assumptions. Anti-cheat engineers, academic labs, and red teams all have good reasons to own this gear.

Activision’s report is a reminder that the public now sees the same hardware class through a cheating lens. The only credible answer from legitimate vendors and researchers is the one Activision itself applies: judge by use, not by label.

In practice, that means:

• Vendors should not market to cheaters. Product pages that name target games or promise to stay “undetected” are selling into the cheat economy, whatever else they claim.
• Researchers should keep work in isolated labs. Testing belongs on owned hardware, disconnected from live matchmaking and other people’s accounts.
• Findings should go to the people who can fix them. Private, coordinated disclosure to a publisher or anti-cheat vendor strengthens defenses. Public tooling mostly feeds resellers.
• Education should cover threat classes, not recipes. Students can learn why bus-level access matters to platform security without learning how to exploit a specific game.

Cyber Ammo has no relationship with Activision or any other publisher, and nothing here should be read that way. We welcome a clearer industry position on this hardware class because it separates legitimate research from the supply chain Activision describes.

Reading the numbers as a defender

A few practical takeaways stand out for security teams and enthusiasts watching this space:

• Economics beat single detections. If cheating is a subscription business, raising cost and churn (through hardware bans, account security, and legal risk) can do more than any one signature.
• Attestation is becoming a baseline. TPM 2.0 enforcement is now named as a pillar of the strategy, which fits the broader industry move toward verified boot state and platform integrity.
• Account security is anti-cheat. With replacement and stolen accounts named as a major revenue stream, protecting ordinary players’ accounts directly reduces supply.
• Hardware classes will keep drawing scrutiny. Expect more public statements that name hardware categories. Legitimate owners benefit from clear documentation of their lab use.

The bigger picture

The September announcements show a publisher fighting cheating the way fraud teams fight organized crime: by mapping the market, following the money, and pressuring every layer from developer to reseller to end user. Whether the headline estimate of about 8.5 billion dollars holds up matters less than the shift in approach. For people who work with DMA hardware for the right reasons, the lesson is simple. The industry will judge the hardware by how it is used, and the research community should hold itself to the same standard, with careful lab practice, honest marketing, and disclosure habits that leave games harder to cheat in.