Valorant’s anti-cheat just made some expensive cheat hardware useless

Riot says a Vanguard update has disrupted most DMA-based Valorant cheat devices by tightening hardware memory access protections.

The change appears to make some expensive external cheat setups unusable, especially those relying on low-level hardware access.

Riot says the update targets cheat hardware and firmware, not ordinary SSDs or PC components.

Some players reported system instability when protections were triggered, raising fresh concerns about false positives.

The update highlights how far anti-cheat systems can reach into hardware-level defenses, while also increasing trust concerns.