Yes although that could be true, cheats can be ran at any time. There is a popular way for cheat devs to inject their cheats and that is before you even boot into windows. Valorant has the best anti-cheat hands down, but for it to be as good as it is they need it to be running 24/7. Face it is also good but not as good as vanguard
@@antivaxxtoaster8919Best anti cheat? I’ve played Valorant for a couple of months after release on my old machine and it was the game where I encountered the most cheaters ever in my life in any game lol, I even added a guy and he didn’t get banned for a shit ton of time, all of this while that garbage is perma on Edit: forgot to add, the anti-cheat is so shit most of people had to do some weird shit to just have Valorant work in the first place, changing settings, booting a certain way and whatnot. What a great piece of software Vanguard has always been. Oh yeah let’s also add how shit it has been on League of Legends too (they are forcing it there too, weirdly) where they wanted to add it months ago yet it’s only active in the Philippine servers currently cause of the insanely high amount of bugs and issues it had on the PBE. For MONTHS now. Best anti cheat tho💀
@@skiry_7207 Maybe you had a bad experience with vanguard, I'm not sure. Me personally I've been playing on and off for over 3 years and only ran into one rage cheater that got banned within 7 rounds, but thats besides the point. I know first hand that vanguard has one of the hardest anti-cheats to reverse engineer, I haven't tried it myself but I know people who have so I can't really tell you if their spying on us or not. Vanguard were one of the first anti-cheats to really crack down on DMA devices, they are really the only companies that give a shit about cheaters, they are the only anti-cheat to my knowledge that has bug bounty program and will pay out if you find a bypass. Riot games is owned by a Chinese company as he pointed out which does seem very bad, so take that as you will but they have the best anti-cheat hands down and they are the only anti-cheat who actually cares about getting rid of cheaters also as a side note when you're reversing the anti-cheat they have a photo of their team and a invite to apply for a job to work for them if you're talented enough.
@@skiry_7207 stop with the Hollywood motherfuker , i have been playing the game since its 1month and i can confirm playing agianst 3 cheaters and i aint even lost no rr , game cancels 3/3..
Quick correction - FACEiT is for Counterstrike 2, but it is a 3rd party Anti-Cheat. It is NOT run by Valve or required to play the game. Instead Valve uses a Server side Anti-Cheat
@@NightRaven5568Not necessarily. It can actually be more effective than Kernel-level AC, but also requires the studio to hire a team whose job is to break the cheats down to their assembly code and write heuristics based on the Assembly..... but they'd rather pay less to build/buy kernel-level AC than to build server-side heuristics. Also, Self-hosted servers with community admins are the best kind of AC, but it also takes away the ability of the publisher to end support and force players to the next game.
I am from India and our government banned the pubg mobile game, tencent released another "Indian" version of the game and claimed the game will not communicate with Chinese servers again. But with a small network lookup i find out that the game is still sending data back n forth to Chinese servers. edit: for some reason my comments gets deleted so here is the updated one 1. Some are saying it could be a CDN or DNS thing, But no the server was owned by tencent. 2. Then actual ban reason was Data privacy indian gov blindly banned nore than 300 apps from the Play Store just becuase the apps origin was from china. Pubg team was aware of this and they removed the "tencent" ( a chinese company) from everywhere in the game. 3. Similarly another game called Garena Free fire got banned for the same reason. Even though its parent company was "Garena" it was powered by "Sea Limited" another chinese company. 4. This issue was found on initial releases of the new game BGMI and tencent was aware of the game connecting to a chinese server, they claimed that its for fetching user profiles and all but hey they got 8 months to release the new game why not just migrate thier servers to somewhere else. 5. If you want proper research paper on this the indian express have a detailed one.
Cool bro, go gamble some money on cases while seeing cheaters every game in the most hacked game in the world. Meanwhile i'll be queing valorant, with the best anticheat in the world currently. Enjoy getting maphacked on every game at high mmr in CS.
@@pixelsavant1 Honestly i can understand why people are angry about that but lets be honest 5 sec : Vanguard is not the only one to do that and we can't (valorant players ) do anything to correct this problem ,except unistall the game but that mean we won't play it anymore unless we like the game.
I mean, that is how every game both in US and China has to do business, by ‘sending information’. You are going to have to be more specific in motive for maliciousness.
@@twenty-fifth420factually incorrect. Do you have to submit your data to the US government everytime you log into COD? No you don’t because that’s ridiculous, however all Chinese games MUST send their data to the CCP. Learn about the topic before distributing misinformation
@@twenty-fifth420the US government needs a proper warrant to receive information from companies relevant to criminal cases. The Chinese government just needs to tell them to fork everything over. Naturally the US government could also buy information from companies, but that isn’t a forced transaction.
Spookiest thing is that kernel drivers have the ability to read memory of other processes meaning they can monitor absolutely everything you do, decrypt your connections to websites, decrypt your crypto wallet and many more.
If more companies will be install more anti-cheats like this. Aftertimes begin approached peoples which liked you full cash on card or you own computer. I think need block like this programs
I think it's important to note that FaceIt is a community project and does not come directly from Valve, the company behind CS2, and they have nothing to do with the FaceIt project. The official anti-cheat of CS2 is VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat).
So CS fanboys will say it's cool if community made kernel anti cheat collects all the data and sells it but not RIOT? lol Riot doesn't even collect data.
@@deivytrajanmore like massive indifference since most people can and will just play on the official client, avoiding kernel level AC entirely. If you don’t want kernel level AC to play Valorant? Tough shit, you can’t even launch the game.
@@deivytrajan I don't play CS2 nor Valorant, but I think no game should have kernel-level access to your machine. Also, I don't know if Riot or FACEIT collect data.
also another thing to mention, with FACEIT they have far less motives to monitor your PC, with it being just an esports platform and the company was found in London. Riot however, is technically owned by the Chinese Goverment, who would benefit from having everyone's data from all over the world.
Just imagine Tim Sweeney telling you that the attack surface on Linux is just too big. When you can easily defeat their kernel mode anticheat by halting and resuming the initiating process when the driver is loaded.
@@imhyouka8101 bro you said nothing in a whole sentence, you cannot inject cheats into other games if you have vanguard on because it flags them, i guess you never had vanguard on your pc
I remember a friend begged me to hop on Valorant, jumped through all the hoops of recovering my user, installing the game, installing the anticheat, enabling and disabling windows features that the game wanted me to... and as soon as I launched the game I blue screened with kernel security error :D (i9-12900k, rtx3080, msi z690) Uninstalled everything, re-setup how I liked my machine and never looked back
@@mosti72 Oh you mean the same anti-tamper protection that also stopped EAC and Battleye from working? Or let me guess, you didn't do enough research to know that most major AC's were affected?
@@unearthlynarratives_ Did I ever say that it only exclusively blocks Vanguard? FYI, I've had similar experiences with other anti-cheat software, and I'd say the worse I had experienced so far is nProtect. My point is that the Windows anti-tampering mechanisms itself doesn't like these anti-cheat software.
It's _something_ ! I called Razer for a failure of a pretty new headset - instead of asking if I'd turned it off and on again, they asked if I had installed Valorant.
Riot responded to this issue saying the drivers that Razer devices require were so bad that cheaters could trivially inject cheats into the driver and circumvent Vanguard so Vanguard just blacklists that driver from functioning properly. Razer also is a non-US company that requires you to run software 24/7 to get basic features of your devices working, but let's ignore that.
This is something i never knew the anti cheat even did, really informative in less than 10 minutes! Props to the PC Security channel for being this informative!
This is something everyone already knew, but as he pointed out it's important to make the distinction in behaviour: while faceit installs a kernel driver you can shut it down and turn it back on at your whim, as opposed to valorant which really strongly nudges you into having it on 24/7 and making it extremely inconvenient to not have it on.
@@xFluing ah I see, I never personally played valorant or any other shooter games on pc, and I don't face myself towards the gaming industry too much so this is new information to me, but I am glad people were already aware of such thing.
@@xFluing Except that you got it the wrong way round, when you disable vanguard, it unloads the driver, FACEIT driver runs 24/7 regardless if you have the anti-cheat on or off. Not being able to just unload and load drivers is extremely important for a kernel AC.
Honestly you should rename this to "Is Vanguard Spyware?" or "Is Riot Game's programs Spyware?" because I literally linked this to a friend who begs me to play League (which also uses Vanguard now by the way) and he simply responded with "Don't play Valorant so doesn't matter" and won't even watch the video... He might not be the target audience but simply asking if Valorant is spyware isn't really accurate anymore now that they're forcing it onto players for all Riot games now.
🤓 actually vanguard is currently only on the philippines server so if your friend is not playing on that server he does not need vanguard to be installed to play league
People when a succesful anti cheating software gets pushed forward: pikachu face. You're using the internet. If you use discord, any social media, any google services, got an android device from any popular company then... congrats. Your data is already sold somewhere without you ever knowing. But vanguard is the bad guy here. Even though in 4 years there was not a single case of it being compromised or.... you know, doing any harm. Makes sense, right?
Yeaaa and then i play 2games of cs and rb6 and i get insta spinboting in cs and obvious walls in rb 6 oh and dont get me even started about tarkov 😂😂 i have never encountered a cheater in valorant in 2 years of playing.
@@callmenik1298 the reason theres no cheaters is cuz everyone is fucking scared of the anticheat actually just bricking their computer. one day we will decompile the anticheat and its just gonna have a dedicated function to just wipe your hard drive
@@sx1805 the only way to uninstall it is go into settings and then apps. the thing is the game doesnt uninstall at all even after a reboot. the true way of uninstalling is deleting the game folder, uninstalling vanguard and then riot client itself
go to control panel, uninstall valorant and then it will ask you to uninstall vanguard aswell, do so, then delete the riot client alongside with any other games.
It's also about trusting the integrity of the driver. All it takes is an upstream backdoor to get pushed out to millions of people with ring 0 kernel access and it's gg
Is it just me thinks there's an alternate earth where all softwares want ring 0 kernel access to avoid being cheated / 🏴☠ If all softwares are ring 0 kernel access, no one is.
This is legit terrifying because you know it’s watching you 24/7 and there could be a very small chance that the software gets hacked and the hacker can grab your information, see what you look like, etc.
Yes, any DRM that runs with kernel level permissions can be considered spyware turning into malware category, Windows is already a data harvesting center, no need to add more vulnerabilities to it.
Something I'd like to add simply as food for thought is that vanguard, from a anticheat perspective, runs before user mode is initialized due to the fact that cheating drivers are able to be launched before user mode initializes as well. This way the anti cheat can catch cheat drivers that inject into the host pc to then uninitialize before VGC can run. I think their are much better work arounds for this rather than making your AC run as a kernel driver 24/7 on your pc but it does make sense as an argument as to why it needs to be initialized at boot.
Someone with critical thinking skills in the comments? You can't be here lol You're completely right. It makes perfect sense that it works and runs the way it does. Most people just use the word rootkit as a buzzword because you can farm clicks from people who wouldn't change their opinion even if the AC was found to be safe. Riot would be stupid as hell to use this to steal anything from its users. Their reputation would not just go out the window but they would also be in trouble legally.
@@zezanje1 I mean no defensive system is going to ever be bulletproof. Anti cheat development is a game of cat and mouse. Also, i agree with you on their being other methods, just playing devils advocate for the purpose of providing food for thought
@@Kosaii- ye i understand that completely but then why be so invasive when even that much isnt goign to bring you back to where you were a few years ago + a lot of peopel wont play the game just because of that. and now the same is going to happen for league. in my 8 years of playing league i have never met someone who was scripting but now they are supposedly all over high elo so that is why everyone in low elo is forced to have this invasive anticheat on 24/7. makes no sense. they should do something similar to how valve treated csgo. you were allowed to type in a launch command that dissables some parts of the anticheat so you could have programs like discord, faceit and nvidia overlays on during the game, but beacuse of that there are slightly bigger chances of you meeting cheaters, like you are put in sepparate queues from people who dont have that command on, but then again most people prefer to put on filters while playing cs so everyone would have that command on and there was no purpose for the change to make game more clear of cheaters, when its quite clear what the playerbase values more, and i feel like the same woudl go for league. the only peolpe that have problems with cheaters are people in the top 1000 in each reason so a total of less than 10k people, and because of that dozens of millions will have to have invasive anticheat on...
@@zezanje1 that's just dishonest. No one has ever claimed that valorant is cheater free and riot never claimed vanguard would do that. How about not making a bad faith argument because you're too uneducated to actually think of something that makes sense.
They claim it needs to run 24/7 so you can’t inject cheats before u open the game. So when you’re injecting before joining the game, you essentially get tagged and you’re banned. My question however is, how do cheat developers still get around it? What’s the point of having kernel rootkit on your computer when you can still cheat? Then it all adds up. Tencent.
How many blatant cheaters do you encounter in your games though? I encountered only one in more than 400h of playtime, and the cheater was actually banned mid-game. Nobody complains about cheats in ranked, that's how trusted Vanguard is regarding banning cheaters. Maybe it's spyware idk, but regarding banning cheaters, it does a good fucking job.
@@namufoxymaybe because some people closet cheat or arent as oblivious to cheating, closet cheating is ALWAYS seen and is really easy to do when you have experience actually
@@user-zd3iz3xx6k Nope in Vanguard most (if not all) memory injection cheats are detected quite easily. The cheats that people use usually involve a PCI device and a second computer to read the data, for less serious cheats like radar cheats. The aimbots most Valorant cheaters use are Machine learning image recognition HID-based cheats, that provide mouse inputs based on where the enemies are on the screen. I am NOT justifying vanguard's level 0 previleges, I'm just writing some facts for clarification
@@asldfkhjaslkwe're talking about the people CHEATING not the method it's being used to cheat, because everyone already knows how they are able to get cheats, specially when all you need it a little thingy thats 40 bucks on amazon
4:46 Discord has the same kind of EULA but people seem to be mostly overlooking this. It's rather ironic that a lot of people are (rightfully) pointing fingers at Valorant whilst at the same time using an actual turbo-(potentially CCP) spyware platform like Discord.
My boyfriend used to close vanguard after he was done playing but it messed up his game. Now his game freezes more often, takes time to load him into the lobby and gives him a warning for ban after every game even though he doesn't seem to break any rules. He had no choice but to uninstall
acts like malware, uses ring0 rootkit techniques, runs the entire time your pc is running, owned operated and used by the chinese communist party. Nah i think its just an anti cheat to ban cheaters 🤓🤓🤓
I've had valor ant installed on and off for 4 years and nothing has happened, why worry so much, I guarantee the Chinese has sold you're data already regardless of having the anti cheat or not
@@wlockuz4467 The problem is that the average person on TH-cam has no clue what malware is and that's why they watch a video of some random guy hoping he's gonna say what they're already thinking
With a half comprehensive firewall, you can set up logging and rules to do just that. The dream machine pro is a pretty good one if you like Unifi products.
@@ahabsbane this is a good suggestion, but it still can accumulate data when there's no internet access and send it right after you start playing the game, essentially unblocking the firewall.
@@anispinner this is not about blocking it from spying - but about clues if it actually does that. If it sends something when the game is not even running - does that mean something?
I set my firewall to ask me when any app is trying to connect to the internet... Vanguard always try it whenever you out of the game from some time. You play, some time later it try to send data via UDP connection. I wonder why
Updates There's loads of services and apps that are always connected to the internet for the purpose of checking for updates and downloading them when a new one is sent out.
@@yrmuqif i had a pc for gaming i would specifically make it so theres nothing of value on it and i would have it on a separate network because video games are chalk full of malware and online games open yourself to network attacks from easily angry gamer script kiddies.
An excellent topic since it involves so many games nowadays. It would be great if you could do more reporting on similar software, so that people can make more informed choices.
Also not to mention that it REQUIRES you to have Secure Boot enabled in bios 💀 Meaning that if I want to run linux based distros and play valorant on Windows, I gotta non stop switch bios settings
I've been playing League of Legends for more than a decade and this is exactly the reason why I purged it out of my life like a month ago, because they're about to implement Vanguard to it too just like with Valorant. This was my limit and they crossed it. In all these years, I haven't found a single cheater in my matches. I won't miss that game anyway and by the way, Vanguard won't stop cheaters completely, only reduce them a bit.
@@John.Doe.X1 You never found a cheater? Were you looking? Were you playing with only people you absolutely knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, weren't cheating? Highly suspect comment.
something to note about FACEIT: while you can stop it you cant play online just by turning it on again you have to restart your pc aswell idk why that wasnt mentioned edit: should also be noted that one of the ways that csgo cheats bypassed vac for a LONG time was just shutting down vac/steam loading all the stuff needed and then turning it back on so its not like its completly pointless that vanguard is always running and wont let you play valorant if you've turned it off.
Also, note how it behaves when you try to uninstall Valorant. It won't let you unless you're good with computers and figure out to first delete the Riot Client's local appdata folder and then uninstall the Riot Client first, and uninstall Valorant aftwerards. I bet a lot of people just say 'screw it' and keep their software on their pcs after quitting Valorant due to this. I wonder why a game company wants to make it so hard to uninstall a game when the user is unlikely to spend any more money on it.
Nice video! I would have some follow-up questions based on this observation: - How much data does Valorant send when the game is not running? Are we in the kilobytes, megabytes, hundreds of megabytes per hour? - Does this value increase significantly when the game is running? - Are there other events that cause an increase in the amount of data sent? Such as filling in a password/credit card in an online form, typing China or Taiwan on the keyboard, etc.? These could help us understand more about what it does :) Thanks!
valorant sends everything about your config to tencent in the TB range from advertising data to last windows install date, if the game is running it doesn't send anything and functions purely as an anticheat, if you make online payments specifically for riot skins it's reported, other transactions are logged but are disregarded, it also sends more data if it suspects you are using a vpn, riot also keeps a log of if you're browsing their secret list of account selling websites with an IP kept, some of it is security through obfuscation source: nothing, this is just baseless speculation I was hoping someone else could contribute
@@FlazuelJr some of it is plausible, riot won't tell us what they check or do so cheaters can clean up their footprint in those areas so it's not a completely bulletproof anticheat if you know the right things to hide. Some of the things they are actually checking is DMA devices if you potentially did something cheaty but possess a device that can freely edit memory
Bro, relax. If Riot blatantly sent hundreds of megabytes to their servers without you even playing, the US government would become paranoid a long time ago. Just turn off the Vanguard whenever you're not playing. Vanguard needs to load before Windows to make a screenshot of your hardware. After that, it doesn't do anything.
It could be interesting to set up a Pi hole DNS and use it to monitor the DNS lookups over a longer period. Plus trying to block some of the domains to see if the game is still playable.
@@shroomer3867 You're so delusional, drivers are specifically made to BSOD you if you tamper with them. They will have hooks on debugging flags and any changes made to the driver will cause a BSOD. That's how every single AC driver works, they BSOD you to prevent cheaters from reverse engineering it further.
@@namebutworseDon't take your opinion based on famous clips in tiktok, Val community isn't like that, 2 and a half years playing val and never found som eboy/egirl or something like that (only a couple but they were chill)
I don't trust anything that's under the CCP's control, not even chinese citizens abroad. Look up chinese civilian-military merge laws, there are NO chinese civilians, everyone is required to act as a soldier or spy whenever the CCP requests it.
I assume you don't play any unreal engine based games, you don't use discord, you don't play any games on your phone being made by studios where tencent has stakes in them etc. Or else this is just a lie you tell yourself at night to sleep well.
@@ingohregg688 yeah, but difference being Tencent is from China, and lets not fking pretend that China goverment isnt way worse than some others big corporations (unless we are talking about the US) And screw anyone that thinks that this is somehow ""racist""
People are really overthinking this lol Vanguard needs to run on boot so it can monitor drivers that are loaded before the game is ran. Pretty much all game cheats these days load a driver by exploiting a vulnerable driver, then unloads the vulnerable driver and cleans up all traces of it before running the game. Vanguard needs to be running at all times to make sure the user is not doing that, which is a big part of their anti cheat. With anticheats like BE / EAC, they cant detect exploited drivers properly due to the fact the exploited driver has been unloaded and all traces cleaned before the anti cheat is even ran, which makes cheating on BE/EAC games much easier.
Wou, thanks so much. I have waited so long for this kind of video: Video-games + Cybersecurity. Please, the next video could be EA/Respawn Apex Legends? Recently this video-game had a scandal related with cheats and it's anti-cheat in online competition. Thanks!
And the biggest problem is with vanguard running in the background is not even that it could be considered "spyware", BUT that it also slows down your pc aswell. From my experience i have seen a whopping 30-40% performance decrease and way more stuttering on other games while valorant was installed then when it wasnt installed.
I use an Android phone and a Windows PC, so the two major spyware corporations in the world are already sharing everything about me with the most dangerous government in the world and their allies in mischief. So I have no issues with leveling the field a bit by letting Tencent and their people in. 🤷
For it would be a very easy decision.. I would not even consider getting the game. I don't care if it can be disabled (but can it really)... It is a matter of principle.. And coming from a very questionable source makes it even more problematic. Would be nice to see some traffic figures with the service actually activate while not ingame.. If it is still sending/receiving data or maintaining connections. And as for malwarebytes.. I've tested 3 major antivirus/total security solutions in the last month.. Malwarebytes, ESET and Norton 360.... Malwarebytes was slowing my system down so much (it fealt like by more than 50%) it didn't pass the test.... ESET was the best performance wise. But finally settled on norton 360 deluxe because I could get it for a very affordable price. So far it does not dissapoint. Performance impact seems a tad higher than ESET but overal great. Malwarebytes needs serious work (IMHO). I also absolutely dispise Malwarebytes big android like interface.... Like I'm running it on a phone or console. I haven't seen any comparison videos testen several antivirus back to back for years now I think.. Aside from your ransomware 200+ script tests which you seem to like doing but in my opinion the way you are testing it is far from optimal.
So can’t there be an option to not have it running except when trying to run the game and only restarting the pc then and there with the Vanguard in the startup list? Kinda how some very old games/programs worked where you’d insert your disk and restart to boot it Having to manually close it or even uninstall it because you don’t play every day or week seems tedious.
there was something weird about the fact that Vanguard anti-cheat was announced on Riot's anniversary when they announced the game. they didn't spend a ton of time on the game overall, the beta wouldn't launch for a few months, and they decided to spend that time announcing... a new anti-cheat? they really wanted you to know it was a *really* good anti-cheat, and showcased how it would put a huge "game terminated" screen if it detected a cheater, and everyone was like why?
Its because most popular fps have tons of cheater and its annoying, so by announcing that its really good its selling the game has being more cheater free than others
The wonderful thing is, that it's not enough for them so now it's also getting added to League (and TFT due to that). Absolutely crazy how hard the Chinese spy machine goes.
Do pray tell me, what is it so important, or why do you think you're that important that people would have any reason to spy specifically on you? Unless you're against every type of telemetry, then time to move on to a Free Software lifestyle, hop on an obscure linux distro with free software restriction and never touch anything proprietary, stop using anything google related, time to also find a non proprietary cell OS if you use a cellphone. Like we're all in so deep, that thinking this one specific instance of a much larger problem is the real issue, the state of things have violated the privacy long ago and nobody said anything, it didn't start with tencent and it's not gonna end with it.
@@kure1456 that's the thing tho, us spyware is perfectly 'safe' and it can't be an issue but you mention china and they are up in arms instantly lmao. Every time
Worst take I have seen so far. If you took two seconds to read about why Vanguard is coming to lol, you would learn that the old anticheat got compromised and leaked which is why they need a new one
@@W1LLUMP you really expect these people to be able to read if they're watching videos like this that go on about having their data stolen while actively using edge the biggest data theft along with chrome?
I really like these types of videos, I wish you would bring more of this content. You can include R6, Cs2 or some games with Easy Anti Cheat, and then compare them
@@Nabashy have you played those games? I invest thousands hours in Cs, hundred hours in cs2 and thousand hours in apex. They are flooded with cheater. Imagine the pro league of Apex legend NA tournament got hack mid game literally! That tells you what EAC is capable of nothing.
@@johnli7818 always been like that all you goota do is pray god not to have cheaters in your game we ll been there i have 5k hours in cs and 2k in apex i play them a lot
4:14 Hey. btw in task manager there's a thing called "startup apps" and if you click disable on vgk (vanguard) & restart your computer it doesnt give any error and the vangaurd is closed
I mean that's a you problem. Seeing that you have a geometry dash pfp though it doesn't surprise me as you're likely no more than 15. Just uninstall vanguard manually
Let me sum it up for you. Yes, a lot of your data is sent to Tencent. Even when you are NOT playing. Such as your behaviour on your PC and information on what applications you have installed and run. In theory it does make sense to have an anti cheat, which is required to run all the time. If not, there will be many potential ways to avoid the anti cheat. So yeah, if you want more security, you need to give up more privacy and trust the authorities. However the decision whether it is worth the price or not is up to you. I personally dont want my data to be sent to Tencent, so I dont play any riot games.
No... More security does not mean less privacy. Anti-cheats can easily run server side. There's also new anti-cheats that use AI. There's also ban reviews that use AI. Are these the most secure? Well, sometimes. Server side anti-cheats can protect the servers more easily than client side. BattlEye is a joke. You can easily defeat it by renaming the dll file and exe. That's not exactly a difficult thing to do for a cheater. Server side anti-cheats will at least examine the data being sent to ensure, you know, a virus isn't being sent to destroy the server. Not all server sides do this, but it's more possible than relying on client side.
@@SealFormulaMaster first of all there is always server side measurments to avoid cheating, they dont really call it an anti cheat tho. Actual anti cheats should be run on the client's side (due to many factors, its the current best solution). My point still stands, if you want to have security guranteed, you need to give the authorities more rights and power.
@@ryuined I dont think 99% of people have anything to hide. It is just about the fact whether you want to let people use your personal data for their benefit, such as personalized advertisement. Most people dont care, but many others dont want to share that information. Well the consequence of that would be not playing Riot games. Your personal data is your virtual property, its up to you what you want to do with it.
No, you can't... How tls work is that you get the server's public key and use it to encrypt the connection and only the server's private key can decrypt that... Look at it like a pair of padlock and key, the client and the server exchange their locks (public keys) during the handshake and then the server/client lock the message box with the other's padlock and only the server's key can unlock just like only your private key can unlock the server's response... You'd have to actually hook the functions or read the memory to see the message before encryption
You cant really not use Edge, it is the very definition of a rootkit and theres nothing you can do about it unless you stop using W. I mean, Edge as a BROWSER has immensly surpassed its predecessors, I dont see any reason to not use it rather than ideology thinking of not wanting to support one bit these MF's. Other than that, its one of the best browsers right now. Oh and also, you dont even need to use it for it to quite literally gather everything, so... Its all the same in the end?
Can’t really avoid spyware and stuff in general for this. Would you suggest using a different type of spyware if it makes you more comfortable to sleep at night?
no offense but i never understand this quote valorant is free to play (i don't play Valorant btw i have never even installed it) so it means it should have microtransactions so thats how they make money so it's not free technically...
@@meestersecure9060 You might not have seen a cheater, but that doesn't meant there wasn't one. Since the bar for cheating is higher, it means that the cheating is not going to be as obvious, don't expect to see spinbots...
I regularly play valorant and I honestly didn't know anything about this. Great that you gave us awareness of it. Although, it's hard to convince myself to quit when I get a lot of joy playing the game. I'll take the warning and the potential risk I'm putting myself but until then, I'll continue playing Valorant with my friends.
well there goes my solution if i ever decide to uninstall. thought i at least get a U turn if things go south. not only that, i was worried about vanguard not being able to COMPLETELY uninstall and formating drive would be useless since it's embedded at kernel level....
It depends who is at fault. If you go to a gun range and blow your own fingers off, should the gun range be liable for that? You handled the gun incorrectly and injured yourself. Basically, you can still sue them but you need a good reason to. You can't fully waive your rights, for example you can't agree to being murdered, that's still punishable by law, a piece of paper with a signature won't change that, nor will a company with bad safety standards be able to avoid a lawsuit like that. If you go on a rollercoaster after signing a waiver ''don't sue us'' but the rollercoaster collapses and you get seriously injured, the company is still liable, that paper won't hold up in court, it's just there to intimidate you and make you think you don't stand a chance
youve been to a theme park right? allot of contracts can say you cant or no longer can sue us its not that uncommon like liability wavers in the workplace if you get injured or whatever and youre going to sue them they might give you compensation in some form or another and for you to get it you will have to sign a liability waver which states that youve been compensated to your satisfaction and you wave your right to sue
In February 2011, Tencent invested $400 million for a 93 percent stake in Riot Games. Tencent bought the remaining 7 percent on December 16, 2015; the price was not disclosed.
Riot's intentions are very clear here; I have seen maybe two hackers in League in the last 5 years, and nobody complains about it anymore. It's insanely obvious if someone is cheating, and when everyone reports them they will be banned. Their only reason for making us install this is to gain access to our PC
@@alberthcheong5477 in what way? i'm saying there's no need to add something to automatically detect cheating because you can obviously tell if someone is due to how uncommon it is
@@hayden6700 Cheating become more noticeable precisely because the anti-cheat is effectively doing its job, highlighting the negative side more prominently. often overshadowing its positive side.
kind of a wierd thing, when i unistalled valorant its still in the task manager start up with power on programs as a file that can be turned on or be disabled and the icon is a deaflot icon for txt files. Is it still spying on me , idk but im a little bit concerned. Edit: the file name in task manager is "Riot"
I wouldn't call it malware or a rootkit personally, because I feel like you'd be sued even with the EULA in place if anything came out. But what I would say is that it's a security risk in case of a data breach (because this exact thing happened with the ESEA anticheat). And it doesn't even stop cheating. It's supposed to be able to detect any cheat software after booting, but cheaters can just do stuff before booting or at a root or even board level so vanguard can't even do anything about it other than seeing suspicious activity like 2 mice moving or seeing someone read the ram. It'll stop a lot of like kid cheaters, but those who would cheat anyway still do and don't get detected.
It does stop cheating, this is probably the only game where I have never seen a single cheater during a 3 year span. And if you dig into the scene you'll see people paying thousands to cheat and still get detected within days.
@@WuWaMintpickerthere are ways to cheat. trust me. A community I know has been doing it for years and vanguard even running at kernel level can't detect them. It's just not possible to detect the kind of cheats I am taking about, and it's pretty cheap too.
When my game got corrupted I knew never to trust it, but I also found it sus when the Anti cheat was still running when the game is up and running which is a red flag of course. Thank you The PC Security Channel
I will never understand people like this. Do you all really think that you guys are safe just cause you don’t play games with kernel anti cheats. Well guess what, if the devs wanted to steal your personal data they don’t need to make you install a kernel level anticheat. Just installing the game would be enough, not to mention 99% of games already do it and you guys agree to it, next time you buy a game spend a moment and actually READ the terms of service. You will se that all this time you were agreeing to letting them collect your data. If you guys truly want to have privacy, here is what you have to do: throw away your router. 99% of stuff found on the internet collect your personal data no matter how safe you think it is, even now TH-cam is even collecting your data and mine as I type this long ass comment. Vanguard won’t make stuff worse than it already is. Stop being naive sheep, every company wants to screw you over, not just Riot. If you don’t want to play games with kernel level anti cheat, by all means don’t. But don’t go around then thinking your personal data is safe cause in that case you are just being stupid and naive.
@@Zemlja_je_ravna as I said, if you don't want to have vanguard on your pc, you don't have to. However, if you then walk around telling people how much you care about your personal data then you are a naive sheep that is easy to manipulate since your data have already been collected 100 times over by other apps and websites that you spend time on.
If they made the game itself be a stealing data software, then that's an instant legal issue, an anti-cheat is a legal bypassing reason to basically intrude on the user's computer like that. Also this is worse. Other games without this merely collect data that they have access to, a.k.a not literally balls deep in your computer.
from a security standpoint perspective, it is scary to think that if someone finds some backdoor into vanguard, many people could be vulnerable. but are we all acting like riot games NEEDS vanguard to harvest all your data? like they can collect practically all of it from you visiting their websites, making accounts, and just playing the game. seems like just about all the info they really need about you is voluntarily given up by just playing the game. why is it so controversial NOW when they add a better anti-cheat when they have been collecting your data since well before vanguard?
I dont know if this is helpful or not but I usually play valorant on seperate os that i installed on a different hard drive, its a debloated lite version of windows 10 with none of my data included, no sign ins, nothing. Just Valorant. I did this because I use windows 11 as my main OS and my CPU is fairly old and doesn't support all the tpm features valorant needs to run. Am I still safe or do i need to switch to a vm?
to be real for 1 second your data is everywhere , im not even start talking about tiktok but this is another story , this trend of scaring people with collected data is getting boring idk what vanguard is doing on my computer and idc , is a good anticheat who makes my experience good on the game and I don't care about the rest and to say something funny, I once tried a cheat on cs go (yes I use cheats, anyway everyone uses them there) and because I had vanguard it didn't work
People like you are the main reason companies get so invasive in privacy. Honestly, do your thing, the only person that gets hurt is you, and I would continue to avoid invasive programs.
that would happen if you disabled/unloaded the driver of FACEIT AC, stopping only its application will not require a reboot the next time you play. unlike VANGUARD, once you exit the app it will require you to restart your pc if you want to play VALORANT again.
@@wuanggclosing the software without unloading the driver is equal to nothing, since you are keeping the driver running... Valorant unloads the driver when you exit, that why it requires a reboot. Same happens when you unload the faceit driver.
@@diogo9122 Yep which is funny because faceit ac doesn't actually unload the driver unless you manually stop the service via cmd unlike vanguard which unloads the driver when you close vanguard in the tray. Faceit also runs 24/7 regardless if you have it actually on or not lmao
I have a question : " Is Vanguard running if you exit it ?" and I understand why Riot told that rebooting system is needed so another question : " What if cheat driver is loaded before kernel level anti-cheat ? "
I can answer the second question: It's harder to detect "state-of-the-art cheats", because the anti-cheat driver can't scan all starting applications. But it's already possible with vanguard to load a cheat before itself: Cheaters can load Cheat modules via UEFI before even Windows boots. There's a reason why Riot mandates SecureBoot on Windows 11 (although I've heard that it's still possible, just harder)
If you want to complitely disable Faceit AC you have to choose the option "DISABLE FACEIT AC" which was grey in your video for some reason. And when you click it, it will give you the same message as Vanguard, that you have to restart your PC to make it work again... And cheaters nowadays went too deeply in a system just like anticheat, some cheats are trying to start even before Vanguard or pretend to be a Driver. Soo to detect this kind of cheats Intrusive Anticheats had to be made, and if they worked only when the game was working that would not be possible cause cheats could just start before it and bypass anticheat easily.
One Valid and good reason to have it running on Start-up is simply because you can boot Your hacks like wallhacks and things and then boot the game. And it will have a bypass. However, you with it already running. It is supposed to be able to catch. However, it's already been proven that this is not the case. People have already passed it, so it. Having kernel 0 is irrelevant, and having it run on start, is it relevant? But I get the concept of why you would want it to start up before the game start. And have it start on boots, so you can't in theory, bypass the anti chief.
ive experienced one singular game stopped due to someone cheating in valorant in my 300+ hours of playing it so its deffinetly one of the better anticheats also anyone scared about their data deffinetly doesnt take all the precautions they should be doing if they actually cared or knew what they were doing imo blown out of proportions
@@ingohregg688 If you lose an arm, will you also cut off the other arm? Why would you willingly install a security risk? Also, that just means that the anti-cheat found 1 person in your game cheating, it does not mean that there were no more cheaters in your games that it didn't detect...
@@secretzpt176no? if i know i have the plague in my left arm i cut it off if i get a rash on my right arm im not going to cut it off. also this video just isnt enough to warrant me to think vanguard a security risk also it does mean that there was one cheater because you know you can tell when someones cheating ive had enough experience with cs cheaters and have the sufficient game awareness to verrrry confidently know if someones just smurfing or actually hacking
@@ingohregg688 The video doesn't have to show anything, the fact that it's kernel level software that runs on start-up by definition makes it a security risk. If there is any breach then it can deal great damage whilst being practicably undetectable. You are essentially trusting all of Riot's cybersecurity policies and compliance, personnel and dependencies. Keep in mind that even large companies get hacked, even Riot got hacked last year... It's not likely but it's just not worth the security risk. The second part is just biased, the problem with your logic is that you cannot account for cheaters that you didn't notice were cheating. In other words, all of the cheaters that you found were the ones that were bad enough at cheating for you to realise.
it already did for me, i have a different, restricted secondary install with all the malware anticheat games, be it valorant, soon league, helldivers 2 nprotect.. and so on. so when i want to play em i just boot into that and play, then boot back, u might say its annoying... well another excuse to just play less
Same. Actually, I won't be able to even launch it, because Vanguard doesn't work on Linux, since it's only for the NT kernel, so Windows kernel. Thank you Riot for making me quit this game so easily 👍
Should consider the fact it might not be offensive just yet, but the grounds are there. Also (ignoring the Tencent's own intentions), if someone hacks them, they're 10mb valorant background update away from creating a giant botnet lol
I don't really know if Riot/Tencent is actually doing this, full-on dystopian style: Vanguard roll-out, and it does two things: act as a kernel-level anti-cheat AND collect all sorts of (personal) data, that either goes straight to Tencent or is passed on to them by Riot Games. Two birds with one stone, disguise the whole thing as a big anti-cheat and off you go. Wouldn't that be super risky for either Tecent and/or Riot Games? The second half comes to light and makes big headlines, worst-case it costs them a huge amount of money, at least most of what they got from it: Data - for which there's not really a cash prize, but you know what I mean.
if anti cheat runs while the game is not even running that's a huge red flag and i will never touch it
Yes although that could be true, cheats can be ran at any time. There is a popular way for cheat devs to inject their cheats and that is before you even boot into windows. Valorant has the best anti-cheat hands down, but for it to be as good as it is they need it to be running 24/7. Face it is also good but not as good as vanguard
@@antivaxxtoaster8919Best anti cheat? I’ve played Valorant for a couple of months after release on my old machine and it was the game where I encountered the most cheaters ever in my life in any game lol, I even added a guy and he didn’t get banned for a shit ton of time, all of this while that garbage is perma on
Edit: forgot to add, the anti-cheat is so shit most of people had to do some weird shit to just have Valorant work in the first place, changing settings, booting a certain way and whatnot. What a great piece of software Vanguard has always been. Oh yeah let’s also add how shit it has been on League of Legends too (they are forcing it there too, weirdly) where they wanted to add it months ago yet it’s only active in the Philippine servers currently cause of the insanely high amount of bugs and issues it had on the PBE. For MONTHS now.
Best anti cheat tho💀
@@skiry_7207 nah i'd win
@@skiry_7207 Maybe you had a bad experience with vanguard, I'm not sure. Me personally I've been playing on and off for over 3 years and only ran into one rage cheater that got banned within 7 rounds, but thats besides the point.
I know first hand that vanguard has one of the hardest anti-cheats to reverse engineer, I haven't tried it myself but I know people who have so I can't really tell you if their spying on us or not. Vanguard were one of the first anti-cheats to really crack down on DMA devices, they are really the only companies that give a shit about cheaters, they are the only anti-cheat to my knowledge that has bug bounty program and will pay out if you find a bypass.
Riot games is owned by a Chinese company as he pointed out which does seem very bad, so take that as you will but they have the best anti-cheat hands down and they are the only anti-cheat who actually cares about getting rid of cheaters
also as a side note when you're reversing the anti-cheat they have a photo of their team and a invite to apply for a job to work for them if you're talented enough.
@@skiry_7207 stop with the Hollywood motherfuker , i have been playing the game since its 1month and i can confirm playing agianst 3 cheaters and i aint even lost no rr , game cancels 3/3..
Quick correction - FACEiT is for Counterstrike 2, but it is a 3rd party Anti-Cheat. It is NOT run by Valve or required to play the game. Instead Valve uses a Server side Anti-Cheat
True,They use valve anti-cheat
@@marcelbromm2625 Oh yeah they banned for using stuff
But doesn't a server side anticheat suck?
@@NightRaven5568Not necessarily. It can actually be more effective than Kernel-level AC, but also requires the studio to hire a team whose job is to break the cheats down to their assembly code and write heuristics based on the Assembly..... but they'd rather pay less to build/buy kernel-level AC than to build server-side heuristics.
Also, Self-hosted servers with community admins are the best kind of AC, but it also takes away the ability of the publisher to end support and force players to the next game.
@@marcelbromm2625 As a CS2 cheater I must agree
Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes, it is.
I need a medium answer.
@@techaddictdudeis yes
@@EminentEntityit’s*
@@techaddictdudemhm
@@techaddictdude yh
I am from India and our government banned the pubg mobile game, tencent released another "Indian" version of the game and claimed the game will not communicate with Chinese servers again. But with a small network lookup i find out that the game is still sending data back n forth to Chinese servers.
edit: for some reason my comments
gets deleted so here is the updated one
1. Some are saying it could be a CDN or DNS thing,
But no the server was owned by tencent.
2. Then actual ban reason was Data privacy indian gov blindly banned nore than 300 apps from the Play Store just becuase the apps origin was from china. Pubg team was aware of this and they removed the "tencent" ( a chinese company) from everywhere in the game.
3. Similarly another game called Garena Free fire got banned for the same reason. Even though its parent company was "Garena" it was powered by "Sea Limited" another chinese company.
4. This issue was found on initial releases of the new game BGMI and tencent was aware of the game connecting to a chinese server, they claimed that its for fetching user profiles and all but hey they got 8 months to release the new game why not just migrate thier servers to somewhere else.
5. If you want proper research paper on this the indian express have a detailed one.
Hey bro! You know what, you should publish your investigations and make people aware of this fact!
@@gigaheheboilol the thing already shared in most of telegram PUBG cheat channel
Let me know if you have published any articles on this.
Bring it to your authorities.
Yo man can we do a collab on this situation..we can both post it to our channel..
I blocked vanguard on my firewall when I wasn’t playing and it would blue screen my pc when I restarted lol. Had to uninstall riot games completely.
sounds like rootkit sypware to me. like why does it need to run 24/7 or else it bricks your system.
It's a rootkit, windows firewall wont help here, only if you setup firewall on your router it will have any sense.
@@kidnamedfinger.productionsreflash bios or run rkhunter with lynux is an option i mean
I remember this vividly but, I heard that even after uninstalling Valorant, it's anticheat (rootkit) still remains on your system.
@@Sunrise-d819i2Fr
spying on your wallet
MOOD
spying on your soul to see what skins you'll buy
Truer than the absolute truth itself
Fr,The skins will hit headshots much more and are expensive
if you're way too weak and somewhat rich, lol
Playing Valorant should already be unfortunate enough.
I'm glad I quit. Was hooked for 2 years and spent a lil over 500 euro's. I can't believe it myself.
@@Shouko91 LMAO
@@Shouko91 I'm still grateful that you finally quit it though.
@@Shouko91 you could have got a m9 bayonet
@@dinosharttt other trash game that is even worse, people that just play cuz of gamble addiction LOL
"bUt I dOnt HaVe anYthiNg tO hiDe, I doNt CaRe if I haVe maLware in mY coMpuTer"...
riot is not gonna be seeing my 5 terabytes of media
Cool bro, go gamble some money on cases while seeing cheaters every game in the most hacked game in the world.
Meanwhile i'll be queing valorant, with the best anticheat in the world currently.
Enjoy getting maphacked on every game at high mmr in CS.
@@mis8866 this is peak copium. "I'm so addicted that I'm willing to throw away personal security so I can get my cartoon shooting game dopamine hit"
@@joeybarela363 valorant players always defend their game with all their life
@@pixelsavant1 Honestly i can understand why people are angry about that but lets be honest 5 sec : Vanguard is not the only one to do that and we can't (valorant players ) do anything to correct this problem ,except unistall the game but that mean we won't play it anymore unless we like the game.
Something that was not mentioned was that Tencent is legally required to send information to the Chinese government. Have fun playing Valorant!
I mean, that is how every game both in US and China has to do business, by ‘sending information’. You are going to have to be more specific in motive for maliciousness.
@@twenty-fifth420factually incorrect. Do you have to submit your data to the US government everytime you log into COD? No you don’t because that’s ridiculous, however all Chinese games MUST send their data to the CCP. Learn about the topic before distributing misinformation
Does that mean the chinese government knows all of my lose streak?
damn china knows alot about me
@@twenty-fifth420the US government needs a proper warrant to receive information from companies relevant to criminal cases. The Chinese government just needs to tell them to fork everything over. Naturally the US government could also buy information from companies, but that isn’t a forced transaction.
Spookiest thing is that kernel drivers have the ability to read memory of other processes meaning they can monitor absolutely everything you do, decrypt your connections to websites, decrypt your crypto wallet and many more.
You forgot the part where they don't care, their game having no cheaters is more important than user security
If more companies will be install more anti-cheats like this. Aftertimes begin approached peoples which liked you full cash on card or you own computer. I think need block like this programs
You need a agency to be allowed to run debug versions and review code at this level problem solved
@@shroomer3867 No cheaters? Valorant has more cheaters than any other game beside CS:GO probably.
@@kidnamedfinger.productions I meant it as in what they want. I know there are cheaters in Valorant, sorry for not clarifying.
I think it's important to note that FaceIt is a community project and does not come directly from Valve, the company behind CS2, and they have nothing to do with the FaceIt project. The official anti-cheat of CS2 is VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat).
Valve doing anything is funny (VAC is pretty dogshit), but shoutouts to the community
So CS fanboys will say it's cool if community made kernel anti cheat collects all the data and sells it but not RIOT? lol Riot doesn't even collect data.
@@deivytrajanmore like massive indifference since most people can and will just play on the official client, avoiding kernel level AC entirely.
If you don’t want kernel level AC to play Valorant? Tough shit, you can’t even launch the game.
@@deivytrajan I don't play CS2 nor Valorant, but I think no game should have kernel-level access to your machine. Also, I don't know if Riot or FACEIT collect data.
also another thing to mention, with FACEIT they have far less motives to monitor your PC, with it being just an esports platform and the company was found in London. Riot however, is technically owned by the Chinese Goverment, who would benefit from having everyone's data from all over the world.
And people say that Linux is worse for not running some anticheat games like Valorant, but in reality it's protecting people's privacy.
Shit games btw
Which means if you are running windows you are fucked before even downloading valorant lol.
Just imagine Tim Sweeney telling you that the attack surface on Linux is just too big.
When you can easily defeat their kernel mode anticheat by halting and resuming the initiating process when the driver is loaded.
@@MrDT2012we already knew that.
@@sjoer that’s the point LOLOL
Funny thing, some cheats on other games doesn't work if vanguard is active
yeah, because vanguard is an anticheat.
For Riot their Games, not for Tarkov as example
So… you are trying to say that vanguard is affecting the binary code of cheats… ??? I think you don't know how anti cheats works…
Well I know enough to acknowledge that it's weird that the Anti Cheat of Valorant is so strong that it kills of cheats for other Games.
@@imhyouka8101 bro you said nothing in a whole sentence, you cannot inject cheats into other games if you have vanguard on because it flags them, i guess you never had vanguard on your pc
I remember a friend begged me to hop on Valorant, jumped through all the hoops of recovering my user, installing the game, installing the anticheat, enabling and disabling windows features that the game wanted me to... and as soon as I launched the game I blue screened with kernel security error :D (i9-12900k, rtx3080, msi z690)
Uninstalled everything, re-setup how I liked my machine and never looked back
Smoking gun lmao
Skill issue I think
Hey! Had that same issue, just had to leave a pc off for a while, came back and it worked.
@@slawnyfivemowiec dont worry :D I'm not coming back to it. Just wanted to share my experience. But thank you for the heads up :)
I've never had to do any of that lol
Forget those "pro-active detection" tests between Bitdefender and Kaspersky, the real winner is whoever blocks Vanguard
i remember BD had issues with Valo when it first came out lol
@@LynAkihiroVT Lol
Windows itself blocks the Vanguard driver if you have "hardware-enforced stack protection" turned on, and this is supposed to be a security feature.
@@mosti72 Oh you mean the same anti-tamper protection that also stopped EAC and Battleye from working? Or let me guess, you didn't do enough research to know that most major AC's were affected?
@@unearthlynarratives_ Did I ever say that it only exclusively blocks Vanguard? FYI, I've had similar experiences with other anti-cheat software, and I'd say the worse I had experienced so far is nProtect. My point is that the Windows anti-tampering mechanisms itself doesn't like these anti-cheat software.
It's _something_ ! I called Razer for a failure of a pretty new headset - instead of asking if I'd turned it off and on again, they asked if I had installed Valorant.
Holy shit I’m having a problem like that. When you uninstalled Valorant was it fine?
Riot responded to this issue saying the drivers that Razer devices require were so bad that cheaters could trivially inject cheats into the driver and circumvent Vanguard so Vanguard just blacklists that driver from functioning properly.
Razer also is a non-US company that requires you to run software 24/7 to get basic features of your devices working, but let's ignore that.
@@Nors2Ka GPU drivers allow the same thing.
@@Nors2Ka I don't like SteelSeries GG but at least I am not forced to keep it open 24/7
@@Nors2Ka Not kernel mode drivers i assume?
This is something i never knew the anti cheat even did, really informative in less than 10 minutes! Props to the PC Security channel for being this informative!
This is something everyone already knew, but as he pointed out it's important to make the distinction in behaviour: while faceit installs a kernel driver you can shut it down and turn it back on at your whim, as opposed to valorant which really strongly nudges you into having it on 24/7 and making it extremely inconvenient to not have it on.
@@xFluing ah I see, I never personally played valorant or any other shooter games on pc, and I don't face myself towards the gaming industry too much so this is new information to me, but I am glad people were already aware of such thing.
@@xFluing
Everyone minus many that didn’t know, isn’t everyone.
It is similar to “never except…”.
@@antman7673☝️🤓
@@xFluing Except that you got it the wrong way round, when you disable vanguard, it unloads the driver, FACEIT driver runs 24/7 regardless if you have the anti-cheat on or off. Not being able to just unload and load drivers is extremely important for a kernel AC.
Honestly you should rename this to "Is Vanguard Spyware?" or "Is Riot Game's programs Spyware?" because I literally linked this to a friend who begs me to play League (which also uses Vanguard now by the way) and he simply responded with "Don't play Valorant so doesn't matter" and won't even watch the video...
He might not be the target audience but simply asking if Valorant is spyware isn't really accurate anymore now that they're forcing it onto players for all Riot games now.
so ture, most of the people is not smart enough to understand this...
i have a friend too and he does not even care about it, he literally saying "everyone is stealing the data".
🤓 actually vanguard is currently only on the philippines server so if your friend is not playing on that server he does not need vanguard to be installed to play league
@@COLAdg for now...
People when a succesful anti cheating software gets pushed forward: pikachu face. You're using the internet. If you use discord, any social media, any google services, got an android device from any popular company then... congrats. Your data is already sold somewhere without you ever knowing. But vanguard is the bad guy here. Even though in 4 years there was not a single case of it being compromised or.... you know, doing any harm. Makes sense, right?
I honestly never watned to play Valorant simply because I don't have any trust for Tencent at all. I would rather not take that risk.
same.
FAANG are just as bad as tencent...
e-e
you can play valorant through a VM, OrdinaryGamers has a video about it
Your data is already out there. At least you know this devil.
bro I had no clue about any of this. Thank you for the video and explanation.
Dont forget that kernel level games and apps make you more vulnerable
the genshin impact scandal
@@Il_panda whats that
Yeaaa and then i play 2games of cs and rb6 and i get insta spinboting in cs and obvious walls in rb 6 oh and dont get me even started about tarkov 😂😂 i have never encountered a cheater in valorant in 2 years of playing.
@@callmenik1298 And what has that to do with what he said?
@@callmenik1298 the reason theres no cheaters is cuz everyone is fucking scared of the anticheat actually just bricking their computer. one day we will decompile the anticheat and its just gonna have a dedicated function to just wipe your hard drive
Forgot to mention the part where it's difficult to uninstall it also
Just uninstall the game xd
@@sx1805 Uninstalling the game unsurprisingly does not uninstall vgc.
@@sx1805 the only way to uninstall it is go into settings and then apps. the thing is the game doesnt uninstall at all even after a reboot.
the true way of uninstalling is deleting the game folder, uninstalling vanguard and then riot client itself
go to control panel, uninstall valorant and then it will ask you to uninstall vanguard aswell, do so, then delete the riot client alongside with any other games.
use revouninstaller to remove it completely
It's also about trusting the integrity of the driver. All it takes is an upstream backdoor to get pushed out to millions of people with ring 0 kernel access and it's gg
Is it just me thinks there's an alternate earth where all softwares want ring 0 kernel access to avoid being cheated / 🏴☠
If all softwares are ring 0 kernel access, no one is.
@@MangaGamified iirc back in the DOS days a lot of programs get to access the hardware directly (aka ring-0)
@@MangaGamified also if everyone have access to ring-0, the next goal would probably be ring -3 lmao
@@MangaGamified that's why TempleOS exists
Same can be said for Microsoft drivers, AMD, Nvidia?
This is legit terrifying because you know it’s watching you 24/7 and there could be a very small chance that the software gets hacked and the hacker can grab your information, see what you look like, etc.
How would the hacker see what i look like? I have my laptop webcam taped
@@Gustaviustwinkelberry shrug
Yes, any DRM that runs with kernel level permissions can be considered spyware turning into malware category, Windows is already a data harvesting center, no need to add more vulnerabilities to it.
Something I'd like to add simply as food for thought is that vanguard, from a anticheat perspective, runs before user mode is initialized due to the fact that cheating drivers are able to be launched before user mode initializes as well. This way the anti cheat can catch cheat drivers that inject into the host pc to then uninitialize before VGC can run. I think their are much better work arounds for this rather than making your AC run as a kernel driver 24/7 on your pc but it does make sense as an argument as to why it needs to be initialized at boot.
Someone with critical thinking skills in the comments? You can't be here lol
You're completely right. It makes perfect sense that it works and runs the way it does. Most people just use the word rootkit as a buzzword because you can farm clicks from people who wouldn't change their opinion even if the AC was found to be safe.
Riot would be stupid as hell to use this to steal anything from its users. Their reputation would not just go out the window but they would also be in trouble legally.
its a good excuse but there are surely other workarounds. also the anticheat doesnt work properly and people are still cheating so there is that...
@@zezanje1 I mean no defensive system is going to ever be bulletproof. Anti cheat development is a game of cat and mouse. Also, i agree with you on their being other methods, just playing devils advocate for the purpose of providing food for thought
@@Kosaii- ye i understand that completely but then why be so invasive when even that much isnt goign to bring you back to where you were a few years ago + a lot of peopel wont play the game just because of that. and now the same is going to happen for league. in my 8 years of playing league i have never met someone who was scripting but now they are supposedly all over high elo so that is why everyone in low elo is forced to have this invasive anticheat on 24/7. makes no sense. they should do something similar to how valve treated csgo. you were allowed to type in a launch command that dissables some parts of the anticheat so you could have programs like discord, faceit and nvidia overlays on during the game, but beacuse of that there are slightly bigger chances of you meeting cheaters, like you are put in sepparate queues from people who dont have that command on, but then again most people prefer to put on filters while playing cs so everyone would have that command on and there was no purpose for the change to make game more clear of cheaters, when its quite clear what the playerbase values more, and i feel like the same woudl go for league. the only peolpe that have problems with cheaters are people in the top 1000 in each reason so a total of less than 10k people, and because of that dozens of millions will have to have invasive anticheat on...
@@zezanje1 that's just dishonest. No one has ever claimed that valorant is cheater free and riot never claimed vanguard would do that. How about not making a bad faith argument because you're too uneducated to actually think of something that makes sense.
They claim it needs to run 24/7 so you can’t inject cheats before u open the game. So when you’re injecting before joining the game, you essentially get tagged and you’re banned. My question however is, how do cheat developers still get around it? What’s the point of having kernel rootkit on your computer when you can still cheat? Then it all adds up. Tencent.
How many blatant cheaters do you encounter in your games though?
I encountered only one in more than 400h of playtime, and the cheater was actually banned mid-game. Nobody complains about cheats in ranked, that's how trusted Vanguard is regarding banning cheaters.
Maybe it's spyware idk, but regarding banning cheaters, it does a good fucking job.
@@namufoxymaybe because some people closet cheat or arent as oblivious to cheating, closet cheating is ALWAYS seen and is really easy to do when you have experience actually
@@user-zd3iz3xx6k Nope in Vanguard most (if not all) memory injection cheats are detected quite easily. The cheats that people use usually involve a PCI device and a second computer to read the data, for less serious cheats like radar cheats. The aimbots most Valorant cheaters use are Machine learning image recognition HID-based cheats, that provide mouse inputs based on where the enemies are on the screen.
I am NOT justifying vanguard's level 0 previleges, I'm just writing some facts for clarification
@@asldfkhjaslk all that yappin but the only blatant cheat in there is aimbot, everything else is used for closet cheating
@@asldfkhjaslkwe're talking about the people CHEATING not the method it's being used to cheat, because everyone already knows how they are able to get cheats, specially when all you need it a little thingy thats 40 bucks on amazon
4:46 Discord has the same kind of EULA but people seem to be mostly overlooking this. It's rather ironic that a lot of people are (rightfully) pointing fingers at Valorant whilst at the same time using an actual turbo-(potentially CCP) spyware platform like Discord.
How is Discord Spyware
My boyfriend used to close vanguard after he was done playing but it messed up his game. Now his game freezes more often, takes time to load him into the lobby and gives him a warning for ban after every game even though he doesn't seem to break any rules. He had no choice but to uninstall
Cause he closed the anti cheat. Most games won't work if you turn off anti-cheat, because you know.. it's an anti cheat.
@@untitledmisouthere’s this thing called ‘reading’ and ‘understanding the text’. It’s a hard skill to learn and im sure you’ll manage to do so
@@untitledmisou cmon bro valorant fan base cannot defend this one, its crazy how it rus while your pc is off!
your boyfriends pc is just shit
there's is no bf here opsie woopsie 🤭
if it acts like malware...... it is
acts like malware, uses ring0 rootkit techniques, runs the entire time your pc is running, owned operated and used by the chinese communist party.
Nah i think its just an anti cheat to ban cheaters 🤓🤓🤓
so every AV ever is a virus? logitechs software is a virus? all of nvidia's drivers are a virus? Vanguards not doing much different than any of those
This is the best mindset when it comes to security.
I've had valor ant installed on and off for 4 years and nothing has happened, why worry so much, I guarantee the Chinese has sold you're data already regardless of having the anti cheat or not
@@wlockuz4467 The problem is that the average person on TH-cam has no clue what malware is and that's why they watch a video of some random guy hoping he's gonna say what they're already thinking
wish to see network activity when the game is not running. May be very definitive red flag.
With a half comprehensive firewall, you can set up logging and rules to do just that. The dream machine pro is a pretty good one if you like Unifi products.
@@ahabsbane this is a good suggestion, but it still can accumulate data when there's no internet access and send it right after you start playing the game, essentially unblocking the firewall.
I mean, you just saw those connections in wireshark, the game was not running.
@@pcsecuritychannel well... It definitely means it's totally not a spyware =)
@@anispinner this is not about blocking it from spying - but about clues if it actually does that. If it sends something when the game is not even running - does that mean something?
I set my firewall to ask me when any app is trying to connect to the internet... Vanguard always try it whenever you out of the game from some time. You play, some time later it try to send data via UDP connection. I wonder why
Updates
There's loads of services and apps that are always connected to the internet for the purpose of checking for updates and downloading them when a new one is sent out.
Yea, that is exactly why I don't like this anti cheat, not because it's kernel but the behavior
Unless you have value in your pc doesent matter at all I
@@corpingtons in every situation you have something value in your pc)
@@yrmuqif i had a pc for gaming i would specifically make it so theres nothing of value on it and i would have it on a separate network because video games are chalk full of malware and online games open yourself to network attacks from easily angry gamer script kiddies.
@@ricerice245you are just hating on video games 😂 and spitting random accusations around
@@ricerice245just say you don't like to play games
An excellent topic since it involves so many games nowadays.
It would be great if you could do more reporting on similar software, so that people can make more informed choices.
i literally deleted valorant and youtube recommenced me this
your data has been sold to the youtube 😂
theyre in your walls. u nder your skin. ... inside your brain .. . . . wake up . . . . . . . john google is onto you..
@@EfeDursun125data is being sold everywhere, i mean idgaf if youtube sells my name or password, f*** tencent its just personal hate
get a fresh install of windows you still have the backdoor
delete vanguard too if possible
Bro the trainer from OG literally told people about it like 2 years ago, thats the only reason why I uninstall entirely Riot Games.
Nice pfp lol
@@PedroHenrique-wo6pn hello handsome
Also not to mention that it REQUIRES you to have Secure Boot enabled in bios 💀
Meaning that if I want to run linux based distros and play valorant on Windows, I gotta non stop switch bios settings
Oh! Didn't know that! Thanks
That sucks but as a Linux User I'm sure you're skilled enough to make your OS secure boot compatible ;)
You can just install windows 10 and ditch the trash that is windows 11, i dualboot arch+win 10 and no secure boot is required.
fedora, ubuntu, debian and linux mint all have secure boot support, but it can get dicey if you use the nvidia drivers that arent part of the main OS.
This is why you use open suse.
I've been playing League of Legends for more than a decade and this is exactly the reason why I purged it out of my life like a month ago, because they're about to implement Vanguard to it too just like with Valorant. This was my limit and they crossed it.
In all these years, I haven't found a single cheater in my matches.
I won't miss that game anyway and by the way, Vanguard won't stop cheaters completely, only reduce them a bit.
it would be funny if you say you wont miss it and end up going to dota
of course it can't stop them completely, that's just a marketing/reason they give people. it's functioning like any other anti cheat
@@Wanderer3639 I never tried Dota and I'm not interested in it, honestly. The only online game that I play now is Tekken 8.
@@John.Doe.X1 You never found a cheater? Were you looking? Were you playing with only people you absolutely knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, weren't cheating? Highly suspect comment.
@@Dyanosis You're free to believe what you want, I'm not gonna try to convince you.
Have a good day.
something to note about FACEIT: while you can stop it you cant play online just by turning it on again you have to restart your pc aswell idk why that wasnt mentioned
edit: should also be noted that one of the ways that csgo cheats bypassed vac for a LONG time was just shutting down vac/steam loading all the stuff needed and then turning it back on so its not like its completly pointless that vanguard is always running and wont let you play valorant if you've turned it off.
you dont have to restart your pc for faceit AC to work you just have to load it up and restart your game
Simple redundancy check would solve the vac bypass issue which u mentioned in ur edit ? Dont u think ?
Also, note how it behaves when you try to uninstall Valorant. It won't let you unless you're good with computers and figure out to first delete the Riot Client's local appdata folder and then uninstall the Riot Client first, and uninstall Valorant aftwerards. I bet a lot of people just say 'screw it' and keep their software on their pcs after quitting Valorant due to this. I wonder why a game company wants to make it so hard to uninstall a game when the user is unlikely to spend any more money on it.
Nice video!
I would have some follow-up questions based on this observation:
- How much data does Valorant send when the game is not running? Are we in the kilobytes, megabytes, hundreds of megabytes per hour?
- Does this value increase significantly when the game is running?
- Are there other events that cause an increase in the amount of data sent? Such as filling in a password/credit card in an online form, typing China or Taiwan on the keyboard, etc.?
These could help us understand more about what it does :)
Thanks!
china actually wants access to the 5 dollars in your bank
valorant sends everything about your config to tencent in the TB range from advertising data to last windows install date, if the game is running it doesn't send anything and functions purely as an anticheat, if you make online payments specifically for riot skins it's reported, other transactions are logged but are disregarded, it also sends more data if it suspects you are using a vpn, riot also keeps a log of if you're browsing their secret list of account selling websites with an IP kept, some of it is security through obfuscation
source: nothing, this is just baseless speculation I was hoping someone else could contribute
@@trektncome on I read your message hoping to get a source and its just nonsense
@@FlazuelJr some of it is plausible, riot won't tell us what they check or do so cheaters can clean up their footprint in those areas so it's not a completely bulletproof anticheat if you know the right things to hide. Some of the things they are actually checking is DMA devices if you potentially did something cheaty but possess a device that can freely edit memory
Bro, relax. If Riot blatantly sent hundreds of megabytes to their servers without you even playing, the US government would become paranoid a long time ago. Just turn off the Vanguard whenever you're not playing.
Vanguard needs to load before Windows to make a screenshot of your hardware. After that, it doesn't do anything.
It could be interesting to set up a Pi hole DNS and use it to monitor the DNS lookups over a longer period. Plus trying to block some of the domains to see if the game is still playable.
apparently, anything you do to it gives you a BSOD. certainly wise to have such unstable software in your kernel.
@@guguigugu Ah yes, totally not a rootkit
@@shroomer3867 You're so delusional, drivers are specifically made to BSOD you if you tamper with them. They will have hooks on debugging flags and any changes made to the driver will cause a BSOD. That's how every single AC driver works, they BSOD you to prevent cheaters from reverse engineering it further.
@@guguiguguYou don't test software stability by disabling shit it needs.
@@ehqwk thats exactly how you do it
Even if the game is good I'd definately wouldn't want this constantly running.
I dont think this is a "good" game if the fanbase is 99% meowing, uwuing, horny, weird.... "players"
@@namebutworsedepends on server tbh. Most Singapore server filled with the most authenthic SEA slurs
Game sucks ass
@@namebutworseDon't take your opinion based on famous clips in tiktok, Val community isn't like that, 2 and a half years playing val and never found som eboy/egirl or something like that (only a couple but they were chill)
@@Hollowcloud-str i dont watch tiktok, thats how my source is true and isnt chinese spyware
NOOOOOOOO... they saw all my 10 GB furry pics on my pc
Only 10GB? Weak.
@@123456Luck10 I have another furry Skibidi toilet pics too 5GB
So disgusting
I don't trust tencent with a 10 foot pole
Riot games is located in California not china they have stake also riot employees are us citizens it’s not a virus
its called tencent cuz every person that uses its product gets its personal data stolen and sold for ten cents
I don't trust anything that's under the CCP's control, not even chinese citizens abroad. Look up chinese civilian-military merge laws, there are NO chinese civilians, everyone is required to act as a soldier or spy whenever the CCP requests it.
@@PartlyXenonfool go be a teacher at some high school or something homie. Dont waist yo time being up in them comment on TH-cam
I assume you don't play any unreal engine based games, you don't use discord, you don't play any games on your phone being made by studios where tencent has stakes in them etc. Or else this is just a lie you tell yourself at night to sleep well.
Tencent is a huge 🚩
yeaahh but so is like every big corporation
yea racist
@@johnli7818 wtf
@@ingohregg688 yeah, but difference being Tencent is from China, and lets not fking pretend that China goverment isnt way worse than some others big corporations (unless we are talking about the US)
And screw anyone that thinks that this is somehow ""racist""
@@johnli7818 what?....
Me watching this with Valorant running in the background
Lmao😂
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
Bro silently closes valorant 😅😅😅😅
Dont let the video scare you, you’re data is already there, your phone, google, youtube and windows already sell your data.
People are really overthinking this lol
Vanguard needs to run on boot so it can monitor drivers that are loaded before the game is ran.
Pretty much all game cheats these days load a driver by exploiting a vulnerable driver, then unloads
the vulnerable driver and cleans up all traces of it before running the game.
Vanguard needs to be running at all times to make sure the user is not doing that, which is a big part of their anti cheat.
With anticheats like BE / EAC, they cant detect exploited drivers properly due to the fact the exploited driver has been unloaded
and all traces cleaned before the anti cheat is even ran, which makes cheating on BE/EAC games much easier.
Where is that mountain range from your desktop background? Very inormative video by the way.
Cinque Terre
I sure hope you didn't think I was Iran😅
That flag is Italian
There was a dude who said Cinque Terre, but I can't see his comment anymore. I wanted to thank him for being a goated user of this platofrm
Wou, thanks so much. I have waited so long for this kind of video: Video-games + Cybersecurity.
Please, the next video could be EA/Respawn Apex Legends? Recently this video-game had a scandal related with cheats and it's anti-cheat in online competition.
Thanks!
Tencent owns EA therefore they also own apex/Respawn...
And the biggest problem is with vanguard running in the background is not even that it could be considered "spyware", BUT that it also slows down your pc aswell. From my experience i have seen a whopping 30-40% performance decrease and way more stuttering on other games while valorant was installed then when it wasnt installed.
What? That literally doesn’t make sense, are you just running out of space on your computer?
Get your PC cleaned bro, I think it's just the cobwebs and dust in your CPU fans. lol
That doesn't make any sense, lol.
lol what
I use an Android phone and a Windows PC, so the two major spyware corporations in the world are already sharing everything about me with the most dangerous government in the world and their allies in mischief. So I have no issues with leveling the field a bit by letting Tencent and their people in. 🤷
Nps response. Imagine shilling for a faceless greedy Chinese megacorporation.
7:57 Best part of the video
For it would be a very easy decision.. I would not even consider getting the game. I don't care if it can be disabled (but can it really)... It is a matter of principle.. And coming from a very questionable source makes it even more problematic.
Would be nice to see some traffic figures with the service actually activate while not ingame.. If it is still sending/receiving data or maintaining connections.
And as for malwarebytes.. I've tested 3 major antivirus/total security solutions in the last month.. Malwarebytes, ESET and Norton 360.... Malwarebytes was slowing my system down so much (it fealt like by more than 50%) it didn't pass the test.... ESET was the best performance wise. But finally settled on norton 360 deluxe because I could get it for a very affordable price. So far it does not dissapoint.
Performance impact seems a tad higher than ESET but overal great. Malwarebytes needs serious work (IMHO).
I also absolutely dispise Malwarebytes big android like interface.... Like I'm running it on a phone or console. I haven't seen any comparison videos testen several antivirus back to back for years now I think.. Aside from your ransomware 200+ script tests which you seem to like doing but in my opinion the way you are testing it is far from optimal.
i play the game but i feel like these are one of the things everyone should be aware of with such a delicate topic as data collecting
So can’t there be an option to not have it running except when trying to run the game and only restarting the pc then and there with the Vanguard in the startup list? Kinda how some very old games/programs worked where you’d insert your disk and restart to boot it
Having to manually close it or even uninstall it because you don’t play every day or week seems tedious.
I mean you can manually make it not start like every other application
there was something weird about the fact that Vanguard anti-cheat was announced on Riot's anniversary when they announced the game. they didn't spend a ton of time on the game overall, the beta wouldn't launch for a few months, and they decided to spend that time announcing... a new anti-cheat? they really wanted you to know it was a *really* good anti-cheat, and showcased how it would put a huge "game terminated" screen if it detected a cheater, and everyone was like why?
Its because most popular fps have tons of cheater and its annoying, so by announcing that its really good its selling the game has being more cheater free than others
The wonderful thing is, that it's not enough for them so now it's also getting added to League (and TFT due to that). Absolutely crazy how hard the Chinese spy machine goes.
Do pray tell me, what is it so important, or why do you think you're that important that people would have any reason to spy specifically on you? Unless you're against every type of telemetry, then time to move on to a Free Software lifestyle, hop on an obscure linux distro with free software restriction and never touch anything proprietary, stop using anything google related, time to also find a non proprietary cell OS if you use a cellphone.
Like we're all in so deep, that thinking this one specific instance of a much larger problem is the real issue, the state of things have violated the privacy long ago and nobody said anything, it didn't start with tencent and it's not gonna end with it.
I love how if its a US spyware its ok but when it is Chinese yall start getting paranoid and shit
@@kure1456 that's the thing tho, us spyware is perfectly 'safe' and it can't be an issue but you mention china and they are up in arms instantly lmao. Every time
Worst take I have seen so far. If you took two seconds to read about why Vanguard is coming to lol, you would learn that the old anticheat got compromised and leaked which is why they need a new one
@@W1LLUMP you really expect these people to be able to read if they're watching videos like this that go on about having their data stolen while actively using edge the biggest data theft along with chrome?
This is why I love this channel. Keep up the great work!
I really like these types of videos, I wish you would bring more of this content. You can include R6, Cs2 or some games with Easy Anti Cheat, and then compare them
cs' anticheat is a joke
yea none of them works lmao thats why you need vanguard
@@johnli7818 huh
@@Nabashy have you played those games? I invest thousands hours in Cs, hundred hours in cs2 and thousand hours in apex. They are flooded with cheater. Imagine the pro league of Apex legend NA tournament got hack mid game literally! That tells you what EAC is capable of nothing.
@@johnli7818 always been like that all you goota do is pray god not to have cheaters in your game we ll been there i have 5k hours in cs and 2k in apex i play them a lot
4:14 Hey. btw in task manager there's a thing called "startup apps" and if you click disable on vgk (vanguard) & restart your computer it doesnt give any error and the vangaurd is closed
I'm impress. I deleted the game a week ago, and i can still see the anti-cheat logo in my hotbar. 💀
I mean that's a you problem. Seeing that you have a geometry dash pfp though it doesn't surprise me as you're likely no more than 15. Just uninstall vanguard manually
@@ledark2512he’ll be type of person to full uninstall his software all together and full restart 🤣
Honestly just delete win64
@@Inferdesu yeah i'm gonna do that 😂
Vanguard is considered a separate install, and can be manually uninstalled.
Let me sum it up for you. Yes, a lot of your data is sent to Tencent. Even when you are NOT playing. Such as your behaviour on your PC and information on what applications you have installed and run.
In theory it does make sense to have an anti cheat, which is required to run all the time. If not, there will be many potential ways to avoid the anti cheat.
So yeah, if you want more security, you need to give up more privacy and trust the authorities. However the decision whether it is worth the price or not is up to you.
I personally dont want my data to be sent to Tencent, so I dont play any riot games.
Brother what is your source? Seriously.
i understand, honestly i dont have anything to hide so i dont really care if they have my data or not
No... More security does not mean less privacy. Anti-cheats can easily run server side. There's also new anti-cheats that use AI. There's also ban reviews that use AI. Are these the most secure? Well, sometimes. Server side anti-cheats can protect the servers more easily than client side. BattlEye is a joke. You can easily defeat it by renaming the dll file and exe. That's not exactly a difficult thing to do for a cheater. Server side anti-cheats will at least examine the data being sent to ensure, you know, a virus isn't being sent to destroy the server. Not all server sides do this, but it's more possible than relying on client side.
@@SealFormulaMaster first of all there is always server side measurments to avoid cheating, they dont really call it an anti cheat tho. Actual anti cheats should be run on the client's side (due to many factors, its the current best solution). My point still stands, if you want to have security guranteed, you need to give the authorities more rights and power.
@@ryuined I dont think 99% of people have anything to hide. It is just about the fact whether you want to let people use your personal data for their benefit, such as personalized advertisement. Most people dont care, but many others dont want to share that information. Well the consequence of that would be not playing Riot games. Your personal data is your virtual property, its up to you what you want to do with it.
Can't we somehow change the private key so that we can decrypt the data? Or maybe fetch the original key?
Read it off the memory or the dll
i would love to see a video about that if it's possible
No, you can't... How tls work is that you get the server's public key and use it to encrypt the connection and only the server's private key can decrypt that...
Look at it like a pair of padlock and key, the client and the server exchange their locks (public keys) during the handshake and then the server/client lock the message box with the other's padlock and only the server's key can unlock just like only your private key can unlock the server's response...
You'd have to actually hook the functions or read the memory to see the message before encryption
How do you know that Vanguard is actually not running anymore after pressing the exit button?
You raised some great points about tencent and riot games, and yet you’re still using Microsoft edge
EXACTLY
You cant really not use Edge, it is the very definition of a rootkit and theres nothing you can do about it unless you stop using W.
I mean, Edge as a BROWSER has immensly surpassed its predecessors, I dont see any reason to not use it rather than ideology thinking of not wanting to support one bit these MF's. Other than that, its one of the best browsers right now.
Oh and also, you dont even need to use it for it to quite literally gather everything, so... Its all the same in the end?
it's fine as long as it's american spyware
@@raylying you don't say like that 😂
Can’t really avoid spyware and stuff in general for this. Would you suggest using a different type of spyware if it makes you more comfortable to sleep at night?
"If a big company gives something for free, that means YOU are the product"
no offense but i never understand this quote valorant is free to play (i don't play Valorant btw i have never even installed it) so it means it should have microtransactions so thats how they make money so it's not free technically...
@@Pakistani890 it is free, you can go download it, install it and play while never making a transaction.
they sell skins, real gamers hate naked guns
whats really scetchy is that if you uninstall valorant - vanguard will still be and run on your system until its uninstalled.
I appreciate the deep dive, most of any discussion about the game simply stops at "just don't install it". Thanks!!
And that's why its anti-cheat is so good; its able to access everything on your pc.
literally everything
Wouldn't really say that its good just average, valorant has the same amount of cheaters as most games
@@IWatchSecksplayed cs for a day 3 cheaters valorant for a year 1 and got banned after game
Same amount as other games? Are you just saying that to feel better? I have close to a thousand hours and never seen a cheater.
@@meestersecure9060 You might not have seen a cheater, but that doesn't meant there wasn't one. Since the bar for cheating is higher, it means that the cheating is not going to be as obvious, don't expect to see spinbots...
I regularly play valorant and I honestly didn't know anything about this. Great that you gave us awareness of it. Although, it's hard to convince myself to quit when I get a lot of joy playing the game. I'll take the warning and the potential risk I'm putting myself but until then, I'll continue playing Valorant with my friends.
Same. CS is just not beginner-friendly, and the amount of cheaters too. Tappy FPS are rare too.
@randomvideoboy1...but filled with cheaters
most sane person here…
@randomvideoboy1It’s the exact opposite. Filled with cheaters and valorant isnt
I used to get blue screened when trying to uninstall vanguard. Had to delete registry keys to fully remove it
well there goes my solution if i ever decide to uninstall. thought i at least get a U turn if things go south. not only that, i was worried about vanguard not being able to COMPLETELY uninstall and formating drive would be useless since it's embedded at kernel level....
@@GrammeStudio ur kernel is in the drive too tf are you talking about, why wouldn't it be affected?
Good video. A measured response, not coddling Riot nor being hyperbolic
Several people told valve to implement such kernel level anti cheat but valve wanted to make an anti cheat that should be accessible by everyone.
By accessible to everyone, do you mean everyone having the source code be available?
hahahaha valve is doing jack in terms of anticheat software omg counterstrike ac is such a laughing stock
well i guess they decided that no anticheat is better than kernel anticheat
That is why it is not working
I uninstalled the game and it wouldn't alow me to uninstall the anticheat
Nope
I Uninstalled it afew da Before and you can uninstall tell anticheat easily
@@mohammmedarkiaq dam
I don't think anything can say "You can't sue us" on any contract, that should never be allowed. Everyone has a right to sue.
It depends who is at fault.
If you go to a gun range and blow your own fingers off, should the gun range be liable for that? You handled the gun incorrectly and injured yourself.
Basically, you can still sue them but you need a good reason to. You can't fully waive your rights, for example you can't agree to being murdered, that's still punishable by law, a piece of paper with a signature won't change that, nor will a company with bad safety standards be able to avoid a lawsuit like that. If you go on a rollercoaster after signing a waiver ''don't sue us'' but the rollercoaster collapses and you get seriously injured, the company is still liable, that paper won't hold up in court, it's just there to intimidate you and make you think you don't stand a chance
youve been to a theme park right?
allot of contracts can say you cant or no longer can sue us its not that uncommon like liability wavers in the workplace if you get injured or whatever and youre going to sue them they might give you compensation in some form or another and for you to get it you will have to sign a liability waver which states that youve been compensated to your satisfaction and you wave your right to sue
In February 2011, Tencent invested $400 million for a 93 percent stake in Riot Games. Tencent bought the remaining 7 percent on December 16, 2015; the price was not disclosed.
Riot's intentions are very clear here; I have seen maybe two hackers in League in the last 5 years, and nobody complains about it anymore. It's insanely obvious if someone is cheating, and when everyone reports them they will be banned. Their only reason for making us install this is to gain access to our PC
you just contradict yourself
@@alberthcheong5477 in what way? i'm saying there's no need to add something to automatically detect cheating because you can obviously tell if someone is due to how uncommon it is
@@hayden6700 Cheating become more noticeable precisely because the anti-cheat is effectively doing its job, highlighting the negative side more prominently. often overshadowing its positive side.
@@hayden6700 while it is an obvious solution. an obvious solution is often the worst solution.
@@alberthcheong5477 but there hasn't been an anticheat in league ever until a few days ago so your point makes no sense
kind of a wierd thing, when i unistalled valorant its still in the task manager start up with power on programs as a file that can be turned on or be disabled and the icon is a deaflot icon for txt files. Is it still spying on me , idk but im a little bit concerned.
Edit: the file name in task manager is "Riot"
prob riot client
dude riot is not fucking spying on you. you uninstalled valorant, not riot client, just uninstall riot.
@@omniyx7837 that's the thing, I don't have riot installed
Omg, people are dumb
I wouldn't call it malware or a rootkit personally, because I feel like you'd be sued even with the EULA in place if anything came out.
But what I would say is that it's a security risk in case of a data breach (because this exact thing happened with the ESEA anticheat). And it doesn't even stop cheating. It's supposed to be able to detect any cheat software after booting, but cheaters can just do stuff before booting or at a root or even board level so vanguard can't even do anything about it other than seeing suspicious activity like 2 mice moving or seeing someone read the ram. It'll stop a lot of like kid cheaters, but those who would cheat anyway still do and don't get detected.
It does stop cheating, this is probably the only game where I have never seen a single cheater during a 3 year span.
And if you dig into the scene you'll see people paying thousands to cheat and still get detected within days.
@@WuWaMintpicker lololol i love it when cheaters say they have never seen a cheater in a pvp game
@@WuWaMintpickerthere are ways to cheat. trust me. A community I know has been doing it for years and vanguard even running at kernel level can't detect them. It's just not possible to detect the kind of cheats I am taking about, and it's pretty cheap too.
@@VioIetteMolotov where the hell is this accusation coming from LOL
@@rohithkumarbandari source: trust me
When my game got corrupted I knew never to trust it, but I also found it sus when the Anti cheat was still running when the game is up and running which is a red flag of course. Thank you The PC Security Channel
I will never understand people like this. Do you all really think that you guys are safe just cause you don’t play games with kernel anti cheats. Well guess what, if the devs wanted to steal your personal data they don’t need to make you install a kernel level anticheat. Just installing the game would be enough, not to mention 99% of games already do it and you guys agree to it, next time you buy a game spend a moment and actually READ the terms of service. You will se that all this time you were agreeing to letting them collect your data. If you guys truly want to have privacy, here is what you have to do: throw away your router. 99% of stuff found on the internet collect your personal data no matter how safe you think it is, even now TH-cam is even collecting your data and mine as I type this long ass comment. Vanguard won’t make stuff worse than it already is. Stop being naive sheep, every company wants to screw you over, not just Riot. If you don’t want to play games with kernel level anti cheat, by all means don’t. But don’t go around then thinking your personal data is safe cause in that case you are just being stupid and naive.
He's paranoia, it's just a case of blissful ignorance.
It's not about safety, people have the rights to accept being spied on or not.
@@Zemlja_je_ravna as I said, if you don't want to have vanguard on your pc, you don't have to. However, if you then walk around telling people how much you care about your personal data then you are a naive sheep that is easy to manipulate since your data have already been collected 100 times over by other apps and websites that you spend time on.
If they made the game itself be a stealing data software, then that's an instant legal issue, an anti-cheat is a legal bypassing reason to basically intrude on the user's computer like that. Also this is worse. Other games without this merely collect data that they have access to, a.k.a not literally balls deep in your computer.
@@Zemlja_je_ravna the point is that you’re getting spied on anyways if you interact with the internet to any capacity
literally 3 seconds before pressing the install button this video appears, thank you
Tbh this video is pure shit, go have fun on the game. Your phone, windows, google and TH-cam do has much has vanguard does
what are all the software you used in this other than tcpview? I'm learning and i'd love to try all these tools :))
He didn’t use anything fancy, just regular Wireshark and Microsoft’s Process Explorer
I think he uses porcess explorer and TCPview and maybe some NirSoft utilities.
from a security standpoint perspective, it is scary to think that if someone finds some backdoor into vanguard, many people could be vulnerable. but are we all acting like riot games NEEDS vanguard to harvest all your data? like they can collect practically all of it from you visiting their websites, making accounts, and just playing the game. seems like just about all the info they really need about you is voluntarily given up by just playing the game. why is it so controversial NOW when they add a better anti-cheat when they have been collecting your data since well before vanguard?
League is also Riot's. Does it present the same risks?
I am wondering if any other riot game is at risk, so I would like to know about this too.
Vanguard will be implemented into League this month. So unfortunately yes.
That also means League is no longer playable under Linux
Until Vanguard becomes mandatory to play League,no
Thanks. Oh well....@@etmix7722
You shouldnt play league anyway tbh.
I dont know if this is helpful or not but I usually play valorant on seperate os that i installed on a different hard drive, its a debloated lite version of windows 10 with none of my data included, no sign ins, nothing. Just Valorant. I did this because I use windows 11 as my main OS and my CPU is fairly old and doesn't support all the tpm features valorant needs to run. Am I still safe or do i need to switch to a vm?
yeah its safe
Its safe either way tbh, this video is quite bad, things like cs go have a worse anti cheat but basically do the same thing.
@@FlazuelJr we found riot dickrider
I doubt the anti-cheat would work inside a VM, but completely isolating your two Windows installations sounds pretty safe
how did u get valorant to run without tpm? I'm having the same issue, pls help if u can
Funny thing, Vanguard has been announced to be in League of Legends also in the next month, 14.19 update being exactly.
It's a very sad thing.
Its out, and now I finally have a perfect excuse to my friends to quit.
you can disable the start up in task manager, then run it only when you want to play and then exit from it afterwards
to be real for 1 second your data is everywhere , im not even start talking about tiktok but this is another story , this trend of scaring people with collected data is getting boring idk what vanguard is doing on my computer and idc , is a good anticheat who makes my experience good on the game and I don't care about the rest
and to say something funny, I once tried a cheat on cs go (yes I use cheats, anyway everyone uses them there) and because I had vanguard it didn't work
People like you are the main reason companies get so invasive in privacy. Honestly, do your thing, the only person that gets hurt is you, and I would continue to avoid invasive programs.
"Is valorant spyware?" Man first thing you should ask is "is Valorant a game? "
Correction: FACEIT AC also needs to reboot your machine when you want to play again (if you stop it). Exactly like Vanguard ;)
that would happen if you disabled/unloaded the driver of FACEIT AC, stopping only its application will not require a reboot the next time you play. unlike VANGUARD, once you exit the app it will require you to restart your pc if you want to play VALORANT again.
@@wuanggclosing the software without unloading the driver is equal to nothing, since you are keeping the driver running... Valorant unloads the driver when you exit, that why it requires a reboot. Same happens when you unload the faceit driver.
@@diogo9122 Yep which is funny because faceit ac doesn't actually unload the driver unless you manually stop the service via cmd unlike vanguard which unloads the driver when you close vanguard in the tray. Faceit also runs 24/7 regardless if you have it actually on or not lmao
As far as i know, you can restart the vgc service instead of restarting your computer, and it works perfectly fine
I have a question : " Is Vanguard running if you exit it ?" and I understand why Riot told that rebooting system is needed so another question : " What if cheat driver is loaded before kernel level anti-cheat ? "
I can answer the second question:
It's harder to detect "state-of-the-art cheats", because the anti-cheat driver can't scan all starting applications.
But it's already possible with vanguard to load a cheat before itself: Cheaters can load Cheat modules via UEFI before even Windows boots. There's a reason why Riot mandates SecureBoot on Windows 11 (although I've heard that it's still possible, just harder)
If you want to complitely disable Faceit AC you have to choose the option "DISABLE FACEIT AC" which was grey in your video for some reason. And when you click it, it will give you the same message as Vanguard, that you have to restart your PC to make it work again... And cheaters nowadays went too deeply in a system just like anticheat, some cheats are trying to start even before Vanguard or pretend to be a Driver. Soo to detect this kind of cheats Intrusive Anticheats had to be made, and if they worked only when the game was working that would not be possible cause cheats could just start before it and bypass anticheat easily.
One Valid and good reason to have it running on Start-up is simply because you can boot Your hacks like wallhacks and things and then boot the game. And it will have a bypass. However, you
with it already running. It is supposed to be able to catch. However, it's already been proven that this is not the case. People have already passed it, so it. Having kernel 0 is irrelevant, and having it run on start, is it relevant? But I get the concept of why you would want it to start up before the game start. And have it start on boots, so you can't in theory, bypass the anti chief.
That still have a bypass via EFI drivers.
ive experienced one singular game stopped due to someone cheating in valorant in my 300+ hours of playing it so its deffinetly one of the better anticheats also anyone scared about their data deffinetly doesnt take all the precautions they should be doing if they actually cared or knew what they were doing imo blown out of proportions
@@ingohregg688 If you lose an arm, will you also cut off the other arm? Why would you willingly install a security risk? Also, that just means that the anti-cheat found 1 person in your game cheating, it does not mean that there were no more cheaters in your games that it didn't detect...
@@secretzpt176no? if i know i have the plague in my left arm i cut it off if i get a rash on my right arm im not going to cut it off. also this video just isnt enough to warrant me to think vanguard a security risk
also it does mean that there was one cheater because you know you can tell when someones cheating ive had enough experience with cs cheaters and have the sufficient game awareness to verrrry confidently know if someones just smurfing or actually hacking
@@ingohregg688 The video doesn't have to show anything, the fact that it's kernel level software that runs on start-up by definition makes it a security risk. If there is any breach then it can deal great damage whilst being practicably undetectable. You are essentially trusting all of Riot's cybersecurity policies and compliance, personnel and dependencies. Keep in mind that even large companies get hacked, even Riot got hacked last year... It's not likely but it's just not worth the security risk.
The second part is just biased, the problem with your logic is that you cannot account for cheaters that you didn't notice were cheating. In other words, all of the cheaters that you found were the ones that were bad enough at cheating for you to realise.
How is saying that you can't sue them in a class action lawsuit in the TOS even legal and allowed (If it even is)
sadly league will have to go away from my pc untill they change how vanguard works (never)
it already did for me, i have a different, restricted secondary install with all the malware anticheat games, be it valorant, soon league, helldivers 2 nprotect.. and so on. so when i want to play em i just boot into that and play, then boot back, u might say its annoying... well another excuse to just play less
@@arencorparencorp2189 i wanna do that but league is not worth the work
You will not regret uninstalling it
Same. Actually, I won't be able to even launch it, because Vanguard doesn't work on Linux, since it's only for the NT kernel, so Windows kernel. Thank you Riot for making me quit this game so easily 👍
oh no they are crying cz u left their game
interesting video! if you could do another video on anti-cheats like faceit aswel would be great!
Agreed, vids on easy anti-cheat and BattlEye too would also be really helpful
Should consider the fact it might not be offensive just yet, but the grounds are there.
Also (ignoring the Tencent's own intentions), if someone hacks them, they're 10mb valorant background update away from creating a giant botnet lol
I don't really know if Riot/Tencent is actually doing this, full-on dystopian style:
Vanguard roll-out, and it does two things: act as a kernel-level anti-cheat AND collect all sorts of (personal) data, that either goes straight to Tencent or is passed on to them by Riot Games. Two birds with one stone, disguise the whole thing as a big anti-cheat and off you go.
Wouldn't that be super risky for either Tecent and/or Riot Games? The second half comes to light and makes big headlines, worst-case it costs them a huge amount of money, at least most of what they got from it: Data - for which there's not really a cash prize, but you know what I mean.