Riot has a bounty up to $100,000 available for anyone who is clever enough to report and find any gaps in the system.

Vanguard is Riot's anti-cheat system, and it's a pretty solid one in the world competitive multiplayer online gaming. It would have to be, otherwise Riot wouldn't offer $100,000 if anyone could break it.

The bounty system is in place since Valorant's launch a few years back. It still works and seems like a good way to make some quick money if you are smart enough. All of this is part of an ongoing effort to improve the anti-cheat software. Riot reaches out to the "security community" in order to "help us repair security issues quickly." If you are able to identify new issues - especially those that are really severe - you can report them to Riot's bounty programme on HackerOne and wait to receive a reward.

The bug bounty states: "If you can help us protect our users and their data, by responsibly identifying security issues that we can fix, then you are awesome and we want you to be rewarded," it reads. "Qualifying Bugs will be rewarded according to severity. Our minimum reward is 250 USD. Riot reserves the right to grant rewards at its sole discretion. If you publicly disclose your bug without consulting us, you may not be eligible for a reward. We will evaluate this on a per-case basis."

It is worth $5,000 to $10,000 to alert Riot about "non-traffic-volume-based denial of services," such as a vulnerability which can crash a server with an application, and prevent the target client from joining a game. You can also earn $1,000-$4,000 if the issue affects multiple players or $500-$2,500 if it only affects your own game session.

There are also DDoS issues which can "identify individual players" such as an exploit connecting a player's address to their Riot ID even when they are not in-game or a problem allowing "targeted session disconnection in-game." Exposing these issues could be worth up $100,000.

The rewards for exploits and cheats in Riot Games are slightly lower, but there are more rewards for finding vulnerabilities in Riot’s infrastructure. Be careful not to get carried away. Valorantgameplay bugs will not be accepted. Instead, they should be reported to the player support.

Riot's bounty program is not a coincidence. Many are using it to poke fun at Call of Duty's current anti-cheat system, Ricochet. Twitch partner IceManIsaac jokes that "Activision will offer up to 100 COD points to anyone who can find a replacement for their anticheat, Ricochet."

Ricochet's shadowbanning of innocent players is still a major problem for players, even though Activision just reported another large banwave with 19,000 affected accounts.

Even though Vanguard is more effective, players are still unhappy with both anti-cheat systems. Vanguard and Ricochet use kernel-mode drivers. These drivers will run with Windows, even if you are not playing Call of Duty or Riot. They can also block other drivers from running if they are known to have vulnerabilities that could compromise a client. Since Vanguard was released along with Valorant, a few updates have improved its performance. It now blocks fewer applications.

There were many complaints that the anti-cheat software was causing hardware problems after Vanguard's League of Legends launch. Riot Games previously stated that it could not "confirm any instances of Vanguard bricking anyone’s hardware."

Vanguard isn’t perfect and, while it seems to be performing better than Ricochet right now (or Riot is being careless with their bounty money), it is still a pretty low standard. It's not the worst anti-cheat system, but that doesn't mean it's not worth chasing the grand prize to earn some sweet cash.