# Riot Vanguard anti-cheat

23 Hacker News commenters recommended Riot Vanguard anti-cheat and 29 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Riot's anti-cheat that people credit with deterring cheaters in competitive games; critics warn its kernel-level access is invasive and risky.

## Why people recommend it

- Effective at deterring cheaters (3 comments): "Their anti-cheat is actually much more involved and effective than most would assume." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815271)) "It’s so good in fact that it deters most cheaters from even trying." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46109366)) "Kernel anticheat does work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47385940))
- High-quality implementation in Valorant (2 comments): "Valorant with Vanguard is the highest quality example we have" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48343506)) "that's dramatically worse as anticheats like Vanguard do PCIE & DMA screening, vulnerable driver blocklist enforcement, and other hardening at boot time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550489))

## What people warn about

- Invasive kernel-level access (4 comments): "These things are nasty and invasive, and due to how they are designed could be even used for exploits" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46088516)) "It's invasive, it's an endless arms race, and it runs ring 0 code on your machine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48594392)) "I would’ve been pretty miffed if I had accidentally gotten their kernel modules" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46461536))
- Security exploit and malware risk (3 comments): "the hackers could turn a bug in the game code into full kernel-level root access via the anti-cheat" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46116252)) "something like Vanguard in particular is exploited and abused by malware" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47386465)) "sooner or later we will have vulnerabilities in their kernel spyware" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139266))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Riot Vanguard](https://hackerapproved.com/p/riot-vanguard.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Riot Vanguard anti-cheat", https://hackerapproved.com/p/vanguard/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).