A good hacker will always figure out how to create a cheat. The only thing PunkBuster and other programs are good for are preventing the honest people from cheating. I've played to many games protect by ant-cheat systems with hackers ruining the game. Actually, I've had more problems with Punkbuster than I have with hackers.

The one who is responsibile here are the hackers that code the cheats. The world is full of idiots that belive cheating will grow their e-penis so there is a hunt for cheats, and other skilled people belvie by making cheats/traienrs whatever will earn them respect and fame.

Nothing can be protected 100%, it will get cracked sooner or later.

Some say bad programming is the main cause. I say it's the fault of the game makers that push too much for production. Of course it's not news to anyone but they should be released after it's tested for stuff like that (reverse engineered), not when players say it's playable... Even after 3 years or so, BF2 is still full of bugs, so why not exploit them right. PunkBuster can only do so much.

I don't think it can be prevented, the best you can do is to try and fix the loopholes that you miss and to design the game as much as possible to reduce the long term impact from discovering exploits.

If hacking the game only gets you 5 days of moderate improvement, thats alot less incentive then if hacking the game can be used to permenantly enhance your characters even after the exploit is discovered.

I think this is a very difficult thing for game makers to do, because they can't get too invasive or they run into privacy issues.

Besides, there will always be someone out there wanting the challenge of breaking into the game, so making it harder for them to do so feeds the fire.