Riot say that they’re simply taking necessary measures to prevent cheating, insisting that they need to have such low-level access in order to monitor and detect cheats launched before the game is started. Hackers and viruses will seek to gain kernel-level access to Windows to get up to all sorts of nefarious misdeeds, and any driver or software that taps into the kernel adds additional attack avenues for them to explore. The Vanguard driver now has a system tray icon that will appear when it’s running, allowing you to disable it, putting you into an untrusted mode until you reboot, or letting you uninstall it until the next time you run Valorant… at which point it will be reinstalled and you’ll need to reboot.Ĭheating is bad, obviously, so why is this a big deal? Well, simply put, Valorant is incredibly invasive, taking kernel-level access to the operating system that is a major risk to the integrity and security of Windows 10.
