Easy Anti-Cheat, usually shortened to EAC, is probably the anti-cheat you have launched most often without thinking about it.
A huge install base
EAC is now owned by Epic Games and is offered free to developers, which has made it extremely common. It protects Fortnite, Apex Legends, Rust, Dead by Daylight, War Thunder and many more. Because it is bundled with the Epic Online Services toolkit, new games adopt it readily.
How it protects a game
EAC runs partly in kernel mode. It checks the integrity of the game's files and memory, looks for known cheats and injected code, and monitors for tools that try to read or write game memory. It also collects a hardware fingerprint and ties detections to it.
Account bans and hardware bans
EAC supports both account-level bans and hardware-level bans. When a game enables hardware banning, EAC records machine identifiers so that a banned player cannot simply make a new account and continue. The exact identifiers and policy are chosen by each game's developer, not by EAC alone — which is why ban behaviour differs between EAC-protected titles.
What hardware it sees
Like other kernel anti-cheats, EAC can read a broad set of identifiers: volume serials, MAC addresses, the registry machine GUID, and firmware data such as the SMBIOS UUID. The distinction worth remembering is between identifiers that live in Windows — which software can change — and identifiers baked into firmware, which it cannot.
The takeaway
EAC's reach means understanding it is useful no matter what you play. Its key trait is flexibility: the same anti-cheat enforces very different ban policies depending on the game, so behaviour in Fortnite is not a guide to behaviour in Rust.