DMA Guard requires a BIOS setting most players have never touched, but it targets a category of cheat that's historically been nearly impossible to catch.
Morefun Studios confirmed a new anti-cheat layer for Arena Breakout: Infinite called DMA Guard, first announced July 31 and live as of an official configuration guide published August 5. It targets Direct Memory Access cheats — hardware devices like custom PCIe cards that read and write a game's memory directly from outside the PC, bypassing software-based anti-cheat entirely.
DMA cheats have long been considered close to the top of the difficulty tier for anti-cheat systems to catch, precisely because they don't run as software inside the game process the way most cheats do. DMA Guard works by requiring CPU virtualization — Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU — to be enabled in your system's BIOS. Without it, the game will refuse to launch after the patch and show a specific security-initialization error instead.
If your PC doesn't have virtualization enabled, you'll need to flip it on in BIOS before this patch will let you back into a raid — Morefun published per-manufacturer instructions directly on Steam to walk players through it. This isn't a ban and doesn't mean anything is wrong with your install; it's a one-time setting most players have simply never had a reason to touch before.
The rollout follows an already-aggressive ban cadence: the fortnightly security report covering the two weeks before this scan logged 11,065 cheating bans, including 1,096 permanent ten-year bans and 897 device or IP bans.
DMA Guard shipped alongside Season 6's August 13 content update, which brought back the Warlord Tournament (running through September 13 with rank-locked rewards) and a new TV-Station-only melee-combat mode, plus a round of summer-themed cosmetic events.
Enabling VT-d/IOMMU is a legitimate, safe BIOS toggle used for plenty of non-gaming purposes too (it's the same setting virtual machines rely on) — if you hit the DMA Guard error, it's a five-minute fix, not a sign your hardware is incompatible.