Riot Games has stated that it “would not and cannot” brick players’ PCs, after a number of people began claiming that the company’s Vanguard anti-cheat software was disabling their devices. Riot Games is the developer behind the incredibly popular League of Legends and Valorant, and its Vanguard system is intended to combat increasingly sophisticated cheats and cheaters, particularly hardware-based methods used to bypass traditional anti-cheat protections.
On May 19, a Vanguard update seemed to be blocking DMA, or direct memory access, devices using SATA or NVMe firmware. Claims began circulating that Vanguard was bricking PCs, and humorous images of a “red screen of death” encountered by players began appearing on social media. Riot Games, perhaps unintentionally, fueled the rumors by posting an image two days later showing a collection of cheating devices with the caption “congrats to owners of a brand new $6k paperweight.” Some users began alleging that the Vanguard update had rendered DMA firmware unusable, even after uninstalling the anti-cheat software. Others said that they began to receive instability warnings about an input-output memory management unit, or IOMMU, security feature.
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