Been getting a lot of questions about this, so I wanted to share some behind-the-scenes stuff about how Vanguard Anti-Boost works. Remember, we can't see intent. What we see is a party's MMR, their mains, and the accounts players are swapping to. Red is the "Real" MMR of the party (based on all of their accounts at that time), and blue is the MMR used to place the party at queue-time (meaning also the MMR of their opponent's team). The space between is referred to as the "MMR Delta," and it's also how we rate match fairness (see my last blog post). In the infamous case below, what we saw were players in the party continually swapping to older, inactive accounts, dropping the party's rating repeatedly, and preventing us from placing them accurately. From this, the system interpreted malintent, even though the queuing restrictions they encountered in flex queue were definitely a confounding factor. Ultimately, we do want people to play with their friends, we just want those games to be fair for the other players too. We are going to work to adapt anti-boost better for LoL's Flex groups of 5, but I hope this helps shed some light on what we're detecting and how we're doing it. Thanks for reading.

Probably late, but I just finished Ghost of Tsushima. It was a visually stunning game, and the combat mechanics were pretty fun. It's something I had been putting off for a while, but it feels nice to finally finish that game after years of putting it off my to-do list

Dec'25: MB preboot DMA vulnerability closed Jun'26: More aggressive DMA protection Jul'26: Anti-smurf / Anti-boost expansion Aug'26: Boosting-ring investigations/action Sep 15: 10K~ player ban/action wave Sep 17: 296,416 rank manipulation accounts actioned HOLY COOKED! 👊

Sorry 🥲

296,416 boosters de-boosted 33,083,190 RR removed 105,718,655 LP liquidated 1 Riot Vanguard riotgames.com/en/news/vangua…

PSA: Boosting, smurfing, hitchhiking… it’s all cheating. Vanguard’s boosting detection expanded from @LeagueOfLegends to @VALORANT earlier this summer and bans have been rolling out ever since. 296,416 rent-a-rank customers served and counting.

We just launched a ban wave and actioned 10k~ players using instalockers and name revealing / stream sniping tools and will continue to action anybody using these tools. This is a new surface area for us, so we will continue to iterate on this tech and will ban you if we catch you.

This week in anti-cheat. Banned cheater hides week-old RiotID and posts purely single-player video of an account detected in under an hour. 31M guaranteed impressions. Vanguard instantly detects InsecureBoot exploit, defending literal concept of trust chain. 1 like (my mom).

Riot ID: FaeL o Anacondo#br1 Banned: 2026-09-03 Games Played: 3 Cheat Name: "Sysinfo" (lowskill vibeslop) Hiding the Riot ID: Pointless We can detect anything with time, but VAL is a free to play game. Agree that we have to improve pre-emptive posture for open qualifiers.

scene: your vanguard "emu" turned out to be a honeypot, so you take some time to work on yourself lol

Bro completely crashed out and started doxxing and clearing the discord chat because their customers were complaining too much 😭

Chad Everdox appreciation post. Nick ‘Everdox’ Peterson (@nickeverdox) is genuinely one of the most underrated reverse engineers and Windows researchers in the industry. A lot of people know Riot Vanguard. Far fewer know the depth of Windows internals, kernel, anti-debugging, hypervisor and reverse engineering work behind one of the engineers who helped build and advance it. His old blog is an absolute gold mine. Some of this research is more than a decade old and still covers concepts people are learning and rediscovering today. Old but gold: Easy anti-trace with SYSCALL: everdox.blogspot.com/2015/05… Debugger detection with GetProcessIoCounters: everdox.blogspot.com/2013/11… BTF + LBR anti-tracing: everdox.blogspot.com/2013/10… Paged virtual memory as an anti-debug / anti-dumping primitive: everdox.blogspot.com/2013/03… Kernel/user shared page kernel-debugger detection: everdox.blogspot.com/2013/07… RTL_USER_PROCESS_PARAMETERS anti-debugging: everdox.blogspot.com/2013/02… Full archive: everdox.blogspot.com/ Then there is InfinityHook, another Everdox contribution that became a reference point for Windows kernel instrumentation: github.com/everdox/InfinityH… And his own article on revers.engineering: PatchGuard: Detection of Hypervisor Based Introspection [P1] revers.engineering/patchguar… If you are interested in reverse engineering, Windows internals, Windows kernel research, anti-debugging, anti-cheat engineering, hypervisor internals or obscure tricks buried deep inside the OS, his work is invaluable. Also bookmark the wider revers.engineering archive: revers.engineering/ That site is multi-author and contains excellent work from @daaximus , @aidankhoury across reverse engineering, kernel internals, virtualization and EPT. People spend a lot of time chasing the newest research. Sometimes the real gold has been sitting online for 10+ years. #ReverseEngineering #WindowsInternals #Infosec

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…

lmfao got false banned on claude bro wtf @claudeai @trq212 @DarioAmodei @elonmusk @CIA @FBI @UN @BarackObama @POTUS please help😭

Smurfing. Stream sniping. Queue sniping. Win trading. We're cracking down on all of it.

Man yall rank manipulators are so cooked you dont even understand 😭 The anti cheat team has been working hard on this in collaboration with the Valorant team to deliver this, it is time to let loose I been preparing for this for a while and building a lot of the tools behind the scenes

Vanguard is the best Anti-Cheat... #VALORANT

"Claude make me 10k in 1 month make no mistakes"