Riot responds to cheating claims about Vanguard blocking DMA devices

Last week, Riot Games responded to a recent wave of reactions surrounding Vanguard, its anti-cheat system used in VALORANT and League of Legends, following several accusations claiming that a new update had made certain DMA-based cheating devices unusable. The controversy started after several cheating-related accounts claimed that Riot’s anti-cheat system, Vanguard, had begun blocking most DMA firmware that relies on SATA and NVMe connections.

Some of these claims went further, suggesting that the affected hardware devices might even become unusable outside of the game environment unless users either disabled IOMMU (a low-level system security feature that isolates hardware access) or completely reinstalled their operating system.

The situation quickly gained traction after Riot Games publicly replied with a post congratulating the owners of a “brand new $6k paperweight,” referring to the specialized hardware allegedly used for cheating. In response to the criticism and confusion that followed, Riot later clarified that Vanguard does not physically damage hardware, standard PCs, components, or software unrelated to VALORANT. According to the publisher, the update specifically targets systems attempting to use DMA hardware to access protected memory, while players who do not use this type of device remain unaffected.

Riot explained that Vanguard now enforces certain standard security protections found on modern platforms, including IOMMU, on accounts identified as using Direct Memory Access cheating devices. These protections are designed to prevent external hardware from reading memory in protected applications, including Riot’s games. If a cheating setup continues to attempt operation after these protections have been enabled, Riot said the system may generate hardware faults or instability, but described this as expected behavior under IOMMU rather than damage caused by Vanguard itself.

The publisher also clarified that disabling IOMMU may allow the cheating device to function again outside VALORANT, but players relying on this type of DMA hardware will no longer be able to play Riot titles with those devices enabled. Riot’s broader message is therefore clear: this update is not aimed at ordinary players, but at one of the more sophisticated forms of cheating in competitive games. Although the initial joke about “bricking” PCs created confusion, Riot now presents the measure as a targeted anti-cheat action rather than a risk to standard users.