Vanguard is Breaking Player's PCs

Vanguard is Destroying Valorant and League of Legends Players' PCs

Valorant and League of Legends players are gathering to share their concerns regarding new allegations that Riot Games' security software, Vanguard, may be taking screenshots of their entire screens following its latest update and addition to LoL.

Over the last few weeks, the gaming community has struggled with understanding if the anti-cheat system is actually safe or not. While Riot claims their aim is to boost League of Legends’ security and reduce the impact of cheating, more experienced programmers and players consider it “overkill” due to the game’s slow pace and relatively simple gameplay, which doesn’t require a kernel-level system to secure. Players harshly criticized the release of Vanguard in League of Legends, reporting problems like interference with unrelated files, crashes of other applications, and Vanguard preventing other programs from starting up when the computer boots up. The final drop in this ocean of worries was a piece of Vanguard’s code, which JustAReverser posted on Twitter, explaining how this code is clear evidence of Vanguard capturing screenshots of the users’ entire screen, including Discord conversations or anything else that’s open on the computer at that time apart from Valorant or League of Legends.

Is Riot Vanguard safe?

Compared to other, superficial anti-cheat systems, Vanguard operates at the kernel level, boosting it's ability to access the deepest layers of a player's PC, a significant safety risk that hackers could exploit for malicious intent, according to some players. While other games also use screenshot functionalities, these security systems typically only capture in-game visuals, not the entire screen, to prevent the exposure of sensitive information beyond the scope of an anti-cheat system.

However, Vanguard supporters claim that people don't have the expertise to verify JustAReverser's claims, and it remains uncertain whether Vanguard indeed executes these actions for the Valorant and LoL communities. For now, there's no definitive proof linking the code to Vanguard, although there would be no clear reason for fabricating these claims, especially for a forum user known for reverse-engineering software with the intention of helping others understand how it works in detail.

The player community has raised questions with Riot Games both on their official Twitter accounts, the Valorant and League of Legends Reddit, and even directly via ticket, leading to discussions about the privileges associated with software with such extensive access levels. The moderators on Reddit deleted or blocked dozens of posts, and there have been no replies or comments on Twitter or any other social network thus far.

Riot is currently directing players to a Megathread on Reddit for bug reports and a tech support thread for everything else, and both are overflowing with thousands of Valorant and League of Legends players reporting severe issues caused by the Vanguard patch. On other sub-reddits, there are hundreds of players complaining that their posts were deleted and their access blocked after they asked about the screenshots being taken by Vanguard.

Riot has not made any statements about this issue so far, and only time will tell if they will make any changes to the security system.

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