This is what happened to a handful of players on various competitive multiplayer games, recently reported in this Reddit post from a German. Valorant player. The poster said they picked up a used Ryzen 7 5800X3D CPU, which worked great…but found themselves instantly banned from the game when they logged in. The culprit (besides the alleged cheater) are anti-cheat systems that mark much more than your account or IP address. Modern anti-cheat software also marks hardware, down to individual hardware components.
After contacting developer Riot’s support, the user was informed that nothing would be done to improve the situation. Not only that, but the other components of the player, including the motherboard and storage, have also been blacklisted in the Vanguard anti-cheat system.
Identifying hardware requires some pretty deep connections to a PC’s operating system and even the BIOS. For example, Heise.de reports that Vanguard only works if you have Secure Boot and Trusted Platform Module enabled. These are some of the reasons why games like Valorant and others are still not available on Linux or SteamOS. Similar anti-cheat hardware checks, as well as occasional false positives after used hardware is assigned to a new owner, have been reported for years.
Jon Martindale / Foundry
The exact controls used by each anti-cheat system are generally not known. But from a hardware perspective and with the in-depth tools available at the kernel level, it is technically possible for software to identify individual components, including:
- Processor
- Graphics card
- Motherboard
- SSD or hard drive
- Network adapter
- Operating system specific license
- Any combination of the above
Various other less invasive data points can be used to “fingerprint” individual users beyond their accounts.
I have contacted Riot, Valve and Epic Games – operators of Vanguard, Valve Anti-Cheat and Easy Anti-Cheat respectively – for comment on this story. I asked if they could offer a guide to what hardware could be flagged, how buyers could avoid blacklisted parts on the secondary market, and what recourse an innocent bargain hunter might have if they found their account banned after installing a new part. None of them responded before publication. Based on my research into rare cases in recent years, customer support is generally reluctant to lift bans put in place via hardware identification.
Gn tech
