Riot Games' anti-cheat chief, who said he was 'born to banish game cheaters,' talks about his fierce battle with cheat developers
The head of anti-cheat at Riot Games, the developer of the anti-cheat tool
How Riot Games is fighting the war against video game hackers | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/03/how-riot-games-is-fighting-the-war-against-video-game-hackers/
As long as games exist, there will be people trying to find ways to exploit vulnerabilities in games. Because cheat tools are 'profitable,' tool developers are highly motivated, and game developers are often forced to focus on developing anti-cheat tools.
In recent years, there has been an increase in anti-cheat tools that operate at the kernel level, that is, at the core of the system. One of the most well-known is 'Vanguard,' developed by Riot Games, the developer of popular titles such as 'League of Legends' and 'VALORANT.' Vanguard is an essential tool for playing any Riot Games title, and it is said to have successfully detected and expelled thousands of cheaters every day from VALORANT alone.
Philip Koskinas, Director and Head of Anti-Cheat at Riot Games, described himself as 'a man born on earth with one purpose: to ban cheaters from online games,' and detailed the work of the anti-cheat team.
Koskinas and his team are said to be collecting unique information about the hardware used by cheaters, known as '
The most effective of Koskinas's efforts is Vanguard. Vanguard first uses a security chip built into the PC to check whether the computer has been modified or tampered with by malware or cheats, and if so, prevents it from booting. Vanguard then checks whether all the PC's hardware drivers are up to date, identifying and preventing hardware that enables cheating, as well as preventing cheat tools from loading and executing code in the kernel's memory.
Koskinas said, 'The fight against cheaters is not just about technology, it's also important to understand the cheaters themselves and how they operate.' According to Koskinas, the anti-cheat team has a 'reconnaissance division' that has been infiltrating cheater and cheat tool development communities for many years to gather information. In the course of their activities, they sometimes show internal information to gain the trust of others, claiming that they 'analyzed the information and discovered it.' Through these activities, they obtain information about cheat tools, and when the number of cheat tool users increases, they ban users all at once.
Some cheat tool developers are wary of these spies and are choosy about who they sell to. Tools sold only to a select few users are also called 'premium cheats' and can cost hundreds of thousands of yen each. According to Koskinas, these tools are like selling a 'reputation of not being detected.' The strongest weapon against these tools is 'reputation damage,' and specifically, strategies are being adopted to discredit cheat developers by banning all cheat developers or leaking screenshots showing that anti-cheat teams have infiltrated the cheat tool developer's Discord channel. In more extreme cases, cheaters are publicly called 'useless pathogens' or 'incompetent at games,' exerting psychological pressure on them.
Koskinas said most cheaters fall into two categories: those who use cheap tools that are easy to spot, and those who use premium cheats that are harder to spot, sometimes using specialized cheat hardware, which makes them even harder to detect.
Some extreme cheat tools perform actions that are impossible for humans to perform, and the fact that they are cheats can be easily identified by simply checking the gameplay footage. Cheat tool developers are aware of this, and they are developing and introducing 'cheat tools that perform the same level of action as humans so that they are not obvious as cheats' using AI.
'Most of the cheaters are young people, many of them not yet adults. They get drunk on the power they get from cheating. They'll probably be banned from the game, but until then they'll keep doing it every weekend. Then they'll hit puberty and get better,' Koskinas said with a smile.
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