Riot Games Infiltrates Cheat Communities to Sabotage Them From Within
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- Infiltration into cheaters’ communities is part of Riot’s anti-cheat team strategy to keep cheaters out of Valorant.
- As of early 2025, Riot Games has been keeping cheaters out of Valorant’s ranked matches at a rate of 99%.
- At the core of Riot’s crackdown is Vanguard, a kernel-level anti-cheat tool that runs with the highest level of access to a player’s system.
Infiltrating cheaters’ communities is part of Riot’s anti-cheat team strategy to keep cheaters out of Valorant.
According to the recent talks between the head of Riot Games’ anti-cheat team, Phillip Koskinas, and TechCrunch, the studio behind Valorant is now keeping thousands of cheaters out of the game’s ranked matches every day due to the Vanguard system and undercover operations in cheat developer communities.
Koskinas revealed that his team has a “reconnaissance arm” whose primary responsibility is to obtain and catalog threats, which sometimes involves acquiring cheats. The team acquires cheats in part by using fake identities that have spent years embedded in cheater and cheat developer communities, operating much like undercover agents.
“We’ve even gone as far as giving anti-cheat information to establish credibility. We’ll masquerade as though it was something we [reverse engineered], and explain how an anti-cheat technique works to demonstrate that we know stuff,” said Koskinas. “And then leverage our way into something in development, and then sit there until it launches, allow it to acquire users and then ban everybody.”
At the core of Riot’s crackdown is Vanguard, a kernel-level anti-cheat tool that runs with the highest level of access to a player’s system. This means it can enforce strict security features like Trusted Platform Module and Secure Boot, verify hardware drivers, and block malicious software from executing deep within the operating system.
Today’s cheaters fall into two categories, Koskinas explained: the weekend “rage cheaters,” who download obvious hacks and get banned almost instantly, and the high-end users, who are the hardest to catch, as they spend thousands on external tools like direct memory access (DMA) cheats that require players to use specialized hardware like high-speed PCI Express cards or screen-reader AI-powered aimbots that mimic real human behavior and aiming patterns.
Riot’s approach appears to be paying off; as of early 2025, less than 1% of Valorant’s competitive matches worldwide involve cheaters, according to company data.
