Critical motherboard flaw allows game cheats, Riot Games blocks ‘Valorant’ players that don’t update BIOS — security patches pushed live by all major motherboard vendors

Riot Games, the developer of several popular esports titles such as Valorant and League of Legends, just discovered a security vulnerability affecting several motherboards from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, and ASRock that cheaters can use to bypass hardware security checks and make it impossible for the game’s anti-cheat software to detect them.

According to the company, the Input-Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU), which protects system RAM from Direct Memory Access (DMA) devices, is not fully initializing upon boot in some motherboard models. This means that even though the BIOS might indicate that Pre-Boot DMA Protection is active, it’s not actually protecting the entire system.

DMA devices are hardware that plugs directly into the PCIe slot and bypasses the processor and the operating system. As the name suggests, it interacts directly with the computer’s memory, allowing it to read and write code directly on the system RAM.