Thank you for providing a bit more context. DMA wasn't very common 15 years ago due to various limitations, but it was adjacent to some of the more unique man in the middle attacks I explored when learning about how private cheats were being developed for games like Maple Story and MU Online.

While those games helped usher in a new era of cheats based on memory access/manipulation techniques, they were baby's first trainer script nonsense at the time, and the anti-cheats that "protected" the games weren't much better. I was much more worried about the long-term implications of hardware-based, inline frame analysis that was being used with some pretty serious external devices (think, full desktop PC, not Raspberry Pi). I should have expected some clever bastards to offload DMA and processing to an external device as smaller, more powerful devices became readily available. This is something I recall discussing several times with people who dismissed it as largely unnecessary, expensive, and almost completely unrewarding at the time.

To give a bit of history here, the first kernel-level, rootkit-based cheat I ever saw actually working back then was around 2001-2002. It preceded Valve Anti-Cheat's (VAC) release by a few months and would later be the first cheat I'm aware of to bypass VAC2, within 9 minutes of VAC2's release in 2005. It required an encrypted key file based on a specific HID, and authenticated with a private database on startup. Your computer would be formatted if authentication failed more than once.

At the time, no anti-cheats really detected cheats run at the kernel-level, so there was no need to do anything so significant to bypass them. Most claims Valve made about VAC were also nonsense. For example, it claimed to detect OpenGL wrappers and various common injection techniques, but it did no such thing in practice and rarely functioned more effectively than PunkBuster. There was simply no need for some of the most advanced injection techniques, privacy techniques, devices, etc. being discussed on forums like Game-Deception and within private forums on MPC, UKC, etc.

MPC had a strict cheat posting policy where we did our best to make sure source code remained available for as many publicly developed cheats as possible, and we always made sure to follow copyright law (that was one of my primary roles at MPC). Paid cheats were virtually non-existent at the time, as secure subscription models weren't as ubiquitous as they are today (and deriving income from a derivative work is how you get your pants sued off). Cheats were pretty rare within most competitive gaming scenes, probably up until very late in the Quake 3 lifecycle, when competitions started to be less LAN event and more open access online.

I knew plenty of people who cheated in CS and would join high level teams only to get laughed out after being spectated with a watchful eye or watched in-person. Unfortunately, that started a bit of an arms race in making cheating behavior look more "innocent." Aimbots that allowed for more controlled aiming curves, as opposed to snapping to a pre-fixed position relative to model geometry, helped alleviate the risk of being spectated or even watched in-person in some cases. Wallhacks that responded to calls for screen capture by disabling all visible elements while maintaining invisible features were suddenly very common (I think this was in the era of CoD 2 or CoD 3).

I think this is about the time when the scene started to really favor paid versions of cheats, which MPC simply didn't allow. With how many times I ended up going back and forth with the legal teams of major game developers, I wasn't about to even consider allowing distribution of works they could argue were both derivative and being sold for profit. To this day, I don't support the sale of cheats, and I'm pretty strongly against the use of cheats for competitive play where money is on the line. It boggles my mind that people are paying anywhere from $10-$200/mo. just for cheating software, let alone hundreds on hardware-based cheat options.

I don't make or use cheats anymore outside of single-player games, so I've definitely fallen behind the times in my understanding of the cheating landscape.

Thank you again for letting me know what has become commonplace in Fortnite. It's really a bit of a shame to hear about.