Fortnite adds new Anti-Cheat in effort to combat rising levels of foul play

Cheaters now have another barrier to get through when playing Fortnite.

In Wednesday’s v21.20 update, Epic Games quietly added a third anti-cheat system to Fortnite. The software, called “Hyperion”, joins EasyAntiCheat and Battle Eye on the quest to protect the game from cheaters.

Popular leaker @HYPEX reported that this is also why users on Windows 7 are currently unable to play. Epic have already confirmed that they are working on a fix for those affected.

Cheating has always been an issue in Fortnite, especially when it comes to tournaments. It’s all too common that we see leaderboards change due to the removal of a hacker, even deep into multimillion-dollar events like the FNCS.

Hyperion is made by a company called Byfron Technologies. The team has previously teamed up with other major developers including Riot Games and Blizzard Entertainment.

According to the Byfron website, Hyperion provides the following benefits:

• Thwart dynamic analysis attacks with our novel anti-virtual machine and anti-debugging features

• Curb static analysis with full binary encryption at rest

• Prevent tampering of your protected code

• Block untrusted third-party applications

Don’t understand any of that? Me neither, but it appears to be working. The surprise implementation reportedly caught a number of cheaters off guard, banning them before they were able to react.

It’s very likely that Epic Games and Byfron have collaborated to create a custom anti-cheat for Fortnite.  Hopefully that means it will take a little longer for any bad actors to catch up.

One concern many competitive fans will have is whether this new anti-cheat will have a negative impact on performance. Servers have already been at an all-time low point this season, so any further decline would be severely unwelcomed.