It is an anti-cheat not an anti-mining. 6.996 difficultly is very low, and just 100 miners can easily break 7. And you already know once we break 7, the difficulty goes up until it stabilizes. That is how it works and has always worked. No one is cheating, just people mining.
So we went from 6.9943 to 6.996 within 36h and suddenly difficulty jumps from 6.996 to 7.0481 under 2h and still climbing.
Sorry to be doubtfull but that looks like botnet power coming to the network to me...
I told you near a year ago that your coin was being raped by russian cheaters using some kind of botnets. Your hardfork gave us 24h no more...