I've asked the rest of the staff about this, and am awaiting responses. I will also need to parse through the EULA when I get home. My uneducated guess is that this is not illegal, but might be against the license agreement. I have seen mods/user patches on other games that modify the .exe in this manner before, but there may be agreements in place that allowed them.

Been searching the .data/.cinit segments, have we?