Sony ships music CDs with copy-protection software that hides nasty little applets on your hard
drive. The software does such a great job hiding itself from all detection, in fact, that ne'er-do-wells are
using Sony's software to cloak their cheating programs from Blizzard's anti-cheat monitor,
Warden.
Blizzard's anti-cheat software works by monitoring programs that are running in the background while World of Warcraft is being playeed. Warden is unable to watch for programs that exploit the rootkit technology contained on these Sony CDs: technology that many in the security community are upset about because it also happens to cause system slowdowns and crashes.
We assume that this also increases that chance that folks will cheat with impunity in Everquest, Everquest II, and Star Wars Galaxies but wouldn't that be a funny coincidence if those WoW competitors employed only server-side monitoring for cheats? Curious, if true! (We're being facetious here.)
Seriously, though: Blizzard's Warden only monitors only the client side of the client-server relationship and is not in and of itself sufficient to catch all cheating. Server-side monitoring is costly (in terms of CPU cycles and storage requirements), but clearly necessary, because cheating undermines the egalitarian underpinning of MMOGs.
