In January 2023, Riot Games fell victim to a social engineering attack that resulted in the theft of source code for League of Legends , Teamfight Tactics , and a "legacy anti-cheat platform" [2, 8]. While Valorant’s primary live source code was not the main target, the breach raised massive concerns regarding the potential for future exploits [9].
By seeing how Vanguard checks for unauthorized processes, cheat makers can develop "external" cheats or hardware-level exploits that mimic legitimate system behavior [7, 11]. Valorant Internal Source Code
The code dictates how the game communicates with Riot’s kernel-level anti-cheat, Vanguard [7]. In January 2023, Riot Games fell victim to
Valorant runs on a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 4 [5]. The internal source reveals how Riot optimized the engine for "frame-perfect" gameplay and low-latency networking [6]. The code dictates how the game communicates with
Despite various claims on GitHub or hacking forums, the genuine, up-to-date is not publicly available [15]. Most files labeled as such are usually:
Discover bugs in the game’s memory management that can be used to inject code without triggering traditional detection [12, 13].
Following the theft, the attackers attempted to ransom the data back to Riot for $10 million, a demand Riot publicly refused to meet [8, 10]. Parts of the stolen code were eventually circulated on underground forums, prompting Riot to deploy emergency patches to harden game systems against potential new cheats [2, 8]. Security Implications: The Cheat Developer’s "Holy Grail"