Riot says Vanguard can now detect hardware DMA cheats

Riot has pushed its anti-cheat fight down another layer, saying Vanguard can now detect hardware DMA cheats that reach into system memory directly instead of acting like normal software. In Riot’s telling, that turns a cheat setup into junk fast: the company mocked the blocked hardware as “a brand new $6k paperweight,” a blunt sign that the easy path for hardware cheaters just got a lot more expensive.

DMA cheats have long appealed to cheat-makers because they bypass the CPU and Windows, letting a device plug into a PC and read memory in a way that is harder to catch with ordinary software checks. Riot said Vanguard now uses hardware-level protections such as IOMMU and DMA remapping to isolate PCIe devices and stop that style of attack. In Riot’s support materials, Vanguard runs perpetually to block cheat software and detect cheat hardware, and cheating with unauthorized hardware or software can bring a permanent account ban. Queuing with cheaters can also lead to a 180-day ban.

This is not Riot stumbling onto the problem late. In a December 2023 VALORANT anti-cheat update, the company said it had already seen DMA cheats in cheating communities and had deployed technology to keep them from being effective. Then, in December 2025, Riot said it discovered a critical motherboard flaw that could allow hidden pre-boot code injection. Affected systems were pushed toward motherboard firmware updates through a VAN:Restriction message, another reminder that the anti-cheat fight had moved beyond game files and into system integrity itself.

For legitimate VALORANT players, the practical upside is simple: fewer matches warped by players running hidden hardware tricks, and a ranked ladder that is harder to corrupt. Riot has said ranked games with a cheater had fallen below 1% globally at one point, which is the kind of metric that matters when one bad actor can ruin a lobby, distort MMR, and poison the grind for everyone else. The company has also made clear that its defenses now include Secure Boot, VBS, and IOMMU, not just routine software scans.

The bigger signal is what Riot chose to brag about. A cheat that once looked like a clever workaround now looks like a costly dead end, and that is exactly the point. The hardware arms race is still on, but Riot just made the buy-in steeper, and cleaner matches are the payoff.