This should spook the hell of anyone still playing anything that relies on that. Imagine have that kind of malware running in your system, with kernel-level priviledges, that could simply fuck up your hardware if it thinks you might be cheating.

I'm having a hard time understanding this piece. How is updating the system's firmware causing bricked hardware? Is the new firmware purposefully useless?

So they have been handed some Oday exploits by mainboard manufacturers and are actively exploiting it and somehow I have to like it.

God I hate modern IT.

People say they won't switch to linux because it can't play every game.

Meanwhile games that don't run on linux do shit like this.

Vanguard, has received an update that is allegedly altering system firmware to remove the ability of the user to access certain hardware associated with cheating.

No. No. absolutely not. You are not allowed to alter my system firmware. Absolutely not.

What a terribly written article.

So it's bricking an external piece of cheating hardware and not users' actual PCs, or...?

What dummies. Even if you are cheating, violating a TOS doesn't give them the right to violate the law.

I can't speak to false positives but it would target an external gpu or other device connected for the purpose of cheating. The user can just disable iommu in bios and still use their cheating hardware outside of vanguard protected games.

Congrats to the devs! They won the scumbag race against cheaters. Hope they‘re proud.

Shouldn't that be insanely illegal? This is literally malware. Even if someone is outright hacking into your servers, you can't just hack back and ruin their system. There's a reason the legal side is not supposed to resort to illegal actions, the fuck.

Yeah your game is so important that you get to destroy people's hardware? Shit should be illegal.

Reckless behavior. Don’t trust a game company to exercise this extreme level of control over a device that you are supposed to own.

Just say no to kernel anti-cheat.

The ability to detect the firmware necessary for the cheats comes after collaboration between Riot and various motherboard manufacturers such as MSI, ASRock, and ASUS.

"Our games are so important that we need your help to break devices that your customers plug in to your products"

They sound quite smug now, let's see when it inevitably triggers on someone's legitimate hardware.

That's definitely too heavy handed. It's not uncommon for anti cheat to flag someone erroneously, and to just hand an executioner the ability to nuke your computer without any form of redress is asinine and anti consumer, if not criminal.

Don't worry, it'll only go off if it thinks you're cheating.

On one side, I love how it breaks cheaters hardware, should not have cheated… eh?

On the other side, worried that it might and will break non-cheaters hardware sooner or later.