Are these anti-cheats kernel modules? Asking because I only play two games on Linux and they do not use rootkits. If so one could at least prevent the install

Are these anti-cheats kernel modules? Asking because I only play two games on Linux and they do not use rootkits. If so one could at least prevent the installation using a couple sysctl variables [1]. I do not recommend putting this in /etc/sysctl.conf or in the .d directory as it can break OS updates among other things... I would instead put it in a startup script so that it can easily be disabled and the node rebooted. This would be in the cases the game installer wants elevated privileges and silently tries to install the modules. Obviously it will break the game but maybe that will happen soon enough so that one can request a refund for the games that did not disclose the rootkit. Once these are set to 1 on a running system the only way to set back to 0 is to disable that startup script and reboot as it becomes immutable on a running system. Your OS update tools should also be wrapped to check if this is enabled, warn you and politely abort until it is unset. The failure conditions are not strictly binary and may work, or appear to work until the machine is bricked. Related to this it may be worth installing something that does checksum snapshots of the filesystems to see if a game has tampered with system files. OSSEC, chkrootkit or even a cron job that just does this manually and runs diffs. While some package managers have this functionality they will usually ignore files outside of the package manifest that may get picked up by the system. Immutable off-system backups are of course good too. # do not put in /etc/sysctl.conf, instead use a startup script or a script that is run prior to starting Steam. sysctl -w "kernel.modules_disabled=1" sysctl -w "kernel.kexec_load_disabled=1" [1] - https://linux-audit.com/increase-kernel-integrity-with-disabled-linux-kernel-modules-loading/ https://linux-audit.com/increase-kernel-integrity-with-disab...