Riot Taunts Cheaters After Vanguard Update Blocks Dma Devices
The update shows Riot is actively countering sophisticated hardware-based cheating methods that are difficult to detect through conventional software monitoring.
Reporting from 1 sources: Automaton.
A new Vanguard update for VALORANT disables hardware-level DMA cheat devices using SATA/NVMe standards. Riot Games responded to the news on social media with a message mocking the cost of the now-useless hardware, calling them "paperweights."
On May 19, cheat analyst ogisada reported on X that a VALORANT anti-cheat update had disabled many hardware-level cheats using SATA/NVMe standards. The official Riot Games account responded on May 22 with a post reading: "Congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight."
Vanguard, Riot's proprietary anti-cheat software, runs at the kernel level and monitors activity even when the game is not active. The update targets Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks, which use external hardware to read memory and are harder to detect than software-based cheats. In December 2024, Riot announced Vanguard had improved its IOMMU-based protection to block unauthorized memory access from 1 millisecond after power-on. Ogisada noted that unless the OS is completely reinstalled, cheat hardware will not function on the same PC.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.