I believe that every decent player will sneer at unscrupulous users who use plug-ins to cheat, and wishes that all of them would be caught and their accounts banned. The core-level anti-cheating system “Vanguard” owned by game developer Riot Games recently released a wave of major updates that can be described as “devastating”, directly targeting the “DMA (direct memory access) hardware plug-in” that has long been the most difficult to detect and the most expensive in the game plug-in industry. This move not only caused a large number of players who spent huge sums of money to buy cheating hardware to lose their money instantly, Riot officials also posted on X (former Twitter)Post a harsh message: “Congratulations to those owners of the brand new $6,000 paperweight.”
What is a DMA hardware plug-in?
Compared with software plug-ins that ordinary players are familiar with (such as perspective, self-aiming, etc. programs),DMA plug-in cardIt is a higher level of cheating. It uses a physical hardware device: a DMA card inserted into a PCIe slot to directly bypass the CPU and operating system and read game data in the system memory at the hardware level. Because this method of cheating completely bypasses the core of Windows, it is almost impossible to detect by traditional software-based anti-cheat systems.
The price of this type of DMA plug-in card is extremely high. A complete cheating solution (including dedicated hardware and firmware) can cost up to US$6,000 (approximately NT$195,000). It is mainly popular in highly competitive first-person shooting games such as “VALORANT”.
Vanguard’s IOMMU countermeasures
The core technological breakthrough of the new version of Vanguard is to forcibly enable the hardware security features built into modern computers:IOMMU (input and output memory management unit). The role of IOMMU is like the “gatekeeper” of system memory. It checks whether every device trying to access memory has legal permissions.
According to an official statement from Riot Games, this update allows Vanguard to enforce IOMMU protection at boot, directly blocking cheat device firmware disguised as SATA or NVMe hard drives. Once a DMA plug-in card is detected, its firmware will be “bricked” directly and cannot be used even if it is changed to another computer.
Game: Valorant
AC: Vanguard (VGK)
Today’s Vanguard anti-cheat update blocked the majority of DMA firmwares using SATA/NVMe.VGK suddenly triggered an IOMMU restart warning in-game, after which the DMA firmware becomes completely unusable, even without the game running or after… pic.twitter.com/Sk8bK3INKs
— ogisada (@ogisadaDMA) May 19, 2026
This update is actually not a sudden move. As early as September 2024, Riot had already announced in an official article that Vanguard was working on IOMMU enforcement technology. In December 2025, Riot even released a majorSecurity updates, at that time they discovered that there were security vulnerabilities in the firmware of many major motherboard manufacturers such as ASUS, ASRock, GIGABYTE and MSI, which may cause DMA protection to fail before booting. The solution at that time was to require players to update their BIOS, otherwise they would not be able to start “Special War Heroes”.
This time the update goes a step further, changing from “requiring players to update the BIOS” to “Vanguard proactively forcing IOMMU checks at the system level”, making DMA plug-ins completely invisible.
Official clarification: Normal hardware will not be affected
After the new version of the update was launched, a large number of cheating players wailed on social platforms, complaining that their computers were “broken and bricked” by Vanguard. In response to these complaints, the official Riot Games
congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight https://t.co/3rjZVQntrc pic.twitter.com/fS3JC0FL0p
— Riot Games (@riotgames) May 21, 2026
Faced with strong backlash from the cheat community, Riot immediately emphasized in a follow-up statement that this update “will never and cannot” damage players’ normal PC hardware or software. IOMMU is a built-in security protection mechanism in the system. Only when it detects that external hardware is forcibly reading the game memory, it will trigger system instability or blue screen crash (BSOD). Normal players’ hardware will not be affected at all.
The battle between anti-cheat technology and cheating tactics has been around for a long time. From the earliest application-level plug-ins, to core-level (Ring 0) driver plug-ins, and now to the current DMA physical hardware plug-ins, every upgrade in anti-cheating technology forces cheaters to move to a lower and more expensive direction. Vanguard’s IOMMU enforcement this time directly blocks the living space of DMA plug-ins from the hardware architecture level, which can be called a major breakthrough in anti-cheating technology.
Scope of influence: Not limited to “Special War Heroes”
It is worth noting that the Vanguard anti-cheat system is not only used in “Special Forces”, Riot’s “League of Legends” will also introduce Vanguard in 2024.Bahamut Discussion ThreadA player asked whether LOL has also updated IOMMU protection simultaneously. The poster responded and confirmed that “it is the same system”, which means that players of “League of Legends” will also benefit from this anti-cheating upgrade.
Conclusion
This time, Riot Games enforced an update through Vanguard’s IOMMU, which not only successfully blocked the currently most difficult DMA hardware plug-in, but also responded with a humorous (yet lethal) official account, gaining a huge positive voice on social media. From a technical point of view, this is an anti-cheating milestone from the software level to the hardware level – when plug-in companies are forced to pursue increasingly expensive and low-level cheating solutions, game developers are also working with operating systems and hardware manufacturers to build increasingly difficult lines of defense to break through. For the majority of normal players, the fact that a $6,000 hardware plug-in has turned into a pile of waste is probably one of the most healing news this year.
Source: KOCPC Chinese