Epic Games is increasing its fight against cheaters in Fortnite, and this time it’s zeroing in on PC tournament players.
Starting Feb. 19, 2026, anyone competing on PC will have to meet stricter security requirements, as Epic leans on hardware-level protections to make life harder for cheat users and cheat hardware.
The big change includes enabling Secure Boot, TPM, and IOMMU for Fortnite tournaments on PC. These are security features for modern systems, and Epic is now treating them as a baseline if you want to play competitively.
IOMMU in particular lets the operating system control how devices access system memory, which Epic says helps shield Fortnite’s game memory from being poked and prodded by external cheat hardware.
Most players won’t need a new rig, as the company notes that if your PC is compatible with Windows 11, a group that covers roughly 95 percent of Fortnite’s PC player base, you likely already meet the requirements or just need to make a few adjustments in your BIOS or system settings.
The tougher PC requirements are only one part of Epic’s wider crackdown, though. Alongside the technical changes, Epic is also highlighting fresh legal action against cheaters and other rulebreakers.
Most notably, a player who both used cheats in Fortnite and launched DDoS attacks against Epic’s servers has been hit with a lifetime ban from all Epic games and services, and the company says it has taken legal steps against them as well.
Epic points to a court ruling that handed the company a $175,000 judgment against a tournament cheater who ignored a lawsuit.
It also filed a separate lawsuit targeting the developer of a cheat program and several people involved in selling it, then reached settlements with multiple offenders, including a competitive player who helped others cheat, a cheat seller who also carried out DDoS attacks, and someone who stole and sold Epic accounts.
Epic warns that rulebreakers face bans at a minimum and may also lose any money they made from cheating or related scams on top of potential legal consequences.
On the technical side, Epic says it’s still patching exploits, hardening systems against reverse-engineering, relying on Easy Anti-Cheat’s kernel-level protection, and using data plus machine learning to spot suspicious behavior.
