A blow to cheaters in Valorant! Great reaction to Vanguard

The Vanguard anti-cheat system used by Riot Games for Valorant has drawn not only cheaters but also a wide range of players into the discussion with its latest update against DMA-based cheating hardware. While it was stated that some DMA cheat devices using SATA and NVMe firmware became inoperable on the Valorant side after the update, the real reaction on social media arose due to Vanguard working at the kernel level and users acting with such deep authority over their own computers.

The Vanguard update prevented DMA cheats, the debate grew on social media. Riot Games’ Vanguard system came to the fore with a new update targeting DMA-based cheat mechanisms that have been a problem in Valorant for a long time. DMA, or Direct Memory Access, is a method that allows hardware to access system memory without going through the processor and operating system. While this access can be used for legitimate hardware, it is also used to retrieve data from game memory in cheat systems.

congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight https://t.co/3rjZVQntrc pic.twitter.com/fS3JC0FL0p— Riot Games (@riotgames) May 21, 2026 In DMA-based cheats, the software does not need to run directly on the gaming computer. Players can use hardware that can read the main system’s memory via a separate device or a second computer. This structure poses a serious security problem, especially in competitive FPS games, as it can bypass traditional anti-cheat controls.

Riot’s latest Vanguard update has activated IOMMU protection to prevent these types of devices from working on Valorant. At the center of the discussion are some DMA cheat hardware that works via SATA and NVMe firmware. According to the shared information, these devices became dysfunctional on the Valorant side after the Vanguard update. Any riot game (therefore requiring vanguard) is Malware. i’ve had to reset my entire pc because vanguard bricked it before and this was over a year ago.

ITS MALWARE https://t.co/vrgXkzOzEO— Long Live Madds❤️🔥🐍✌️KC N1 | NOLA N1 (@MaddieHWalker_) May 22, 2026 In the posts circulating on social media, it was claimed that the devices were locked after the IOMMU warning and some users had to reinstall the operating system for a solution. Riot, on the other hand, opposed interpreting these claims as physical damage to PC hardware. Riot stated that Vanguard did not cause physical damage to computers or hardware, and that the update prevented DMA cheat devices from accessing protected game memory.

According to the company’s statement, when IOMMU is turned off, these devices can work again in other environments. However, for Valorant and Riot games, IOMMU must remain open. Riot has clamped down on DMA cheating devices that cost as much as $6,000 In posts shared on X, many users criticized Vanguard for having this level of authority on personal computers, regardless of whether cheaters were blocked. Some users found it unacceptable that a game company was interfering with the hardware behavior of the computer they paid for with software running at the kernel level.

In the debate, precautions should be taken against cheaters, but the opinion that this method is too harsh was frequently expressed. Two topics in particular stood out in the reaction messages. The first headline is that Vanguard is an anti-cheat that works at the lowest levels of the system. Software running at the kernel level has much wider access than ordinary applications because it operates close to the core of the operating system.

For this reason, some players see the fact that the anti-cheat tool has such deep access to the normal user’s computer as problematic in terms of security and privacy. The second topic is that non-cheat users also become parties to this debate. In comments made on social media, some players stated that they did not play Valorant or had nothing to do with the cheat, yet criticized a company running software that actually determines hardware behavior on a consumer computer.

In some posts, it was argued that Riot chose a more aggressive method at the system level instead of banning cheating accounts. On the Valorant side, Vanguard has long been used as one of Riot’s harshest anti-cheat solutions. The system uses operating system-level controls to maintain the competitive nature of the game. While this structure has an important place in Valorant’s fight against cheating, it is also one of the most discussed anti-cheat models among PC players.