Valorant update bricks DMA cheat hardware, forces OS reinstalls

Riot Games deployed a Vanguard kernel update in May 2026 that detected and responded to direct memory access (DMA) cheat activity in Valorant. The update initiated IOMMU restarts on affected systems, after which SATA and NVMe devices used by the cheat hardware stopped functioning and some PCs experienced blue screens. Users reporting the issue said a full operating system reinstall was required to restore the affected storage devices.

DMA cheats run on separate hardware, typically a PCIe card or an external device connected to a second computer, and read game memory directly without interacting with the host operating system. To avoid detection, those devices have used custom firmware that makes them appear as ordinary storage or peripheral devices to the system.

When Vanguard’s VGK component identified the DMA access patterns, it triggered an IOMMU restart. IOMMU is a motherboard feature that controls which devices can map to physical memory. In the reported incidents the restart left the device firmware in a state that standard updates or drivers could not repair, so the devices remained nonfunctional even after closing the game, uninstalling Vanguard or rebooting the machine.

Affected users described system crashes and loss of access to storage devices. Security researchers and players on community boards reported that reinstalling the operating system was the only reliable way to recover the corrupted devices.

A hacking journalist known as Osisada posted technical findings online and players documented failures on discussion boards. Riot’s anti-cheat team wrote, “This will not end DMA cheating entirely,” and noted that developers of cheating hardware will attempt new firmware variants to avoid triggering IOMMU protections.

DMA cheat setups typically cost several hundred dollars. The update left some of that hardware nonfunctional, increasing the financial cost to users who deployed those systems. Riot said the update was deployed to detect the mapping patterns used by those cheat configurations and to prevent unauthorized device access to game memory.

Security researchers and developers are likely to continue adapting their methods, and Riot continues to adjust Vanguard to detect new variants of cheat hardware and firmware.