Riot Games is once again at the center of controversy after a recent Vanguard anti-cheat update reportedly made some high-end Valorant cheating hardware unusable. The company even mocked affected cheaters on X, saying “congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight,” shortly after the update rolled out.
The update appears to target DMA-based cheating setups used by some advanced cheaters in Valorant. These setups are very different from traditional software cheats because they rely on expensive external hardware connected directly to the PC.
DMA stands for Direct Memory Access, a legitimate hardware feature that allows devices to access system memory without constantly involving the CPU. However, cheat makers abuse this functionality to read game memory externally and run cheats such as wallhacks, ESP tools, radar overlays, and other unfair advantages.
These DMA cheating setups are usually connected through PCIe hardware and often work alongside a second PC. Since the cheats run outside the normal software layer, they are much harder for anti-cheat systems to detect. Some of these hardware setups reportedly cost thousands of dollars.
According to reports, Riot’s latest Vanguard update specifically targets cheat hardware pretending to be legitimate PC components like SSDs or storage devices. To stop this, Riot seems to have strengthened IOMMU protections inside Vanguard.
IOMMU, short for Input-Output Memory Management Unit, is a hardware-level memory protection feature that controls which connected devices can access system memory. By enforcing stricter access permissions, Vanguard can block suspicious external devices from reading live game memory.
This effectively cuts off DMA cheats from accessing the data they rely on.
Some social media posts initially claimed Riot had “bricked” SSDs or damaged PC hardware, but Riot has denied those claims. The company says Vanguard does not damage hardware, disable SSDs, or brick PCs. Instead, Riot says the affected devices are cheat tools and modified firmware specifically designed to bypass anti-cheat systems.
However, some users reportedly experienced system instability or even had to reinstall Windows after the update. Riot says this can happen when cheat hardware continues trying to access protected memory after IOMMU protections are enabled. In such cases, the system may trigger hardware faults or become unstable because the unauthorized memory access is blocked.
The incident has also reignited debate around kernel-level anti-cheat systems. Many players praised Riot for taking aggressive action against cheaters, especially against those spending thousands on advanced hardware cheats.
At the same time, others raised concerns about how deeply Vanguard operates inside a player’s system. Some users on Reddit questioned what could happen if legitimate hardware were mistakenly flagged in the future. Others worry that stronger hardware-level restrictions could create trust and privacy concerns for regular players.
Kernel-level anti-cheats like Vanguard run with deep system access, which allows them to detect sophisticated cheats more effectively. But that same level of access has always sparked debate about security, system stability, and how much control a game should have over a player’s PC.
