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Valorant Devs Are Offering $100,000 If You Can Find Exploits

Riot is taking cheating in Valorant very seriously, and wants your help to crack down on exploits.

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Riot is taking security very seriously for Valorant, its team-based shooter currently in closed beta. In an effort to reduce cheating, Riot is ramping up its bounty program and is offering as much as $100,000 USD to those who can find exploits in its anti-cheating technology, Vanguard.

Riot's HackerOne bug bounty program, which has been running for more than six years, is now going to pay out even more money to help encourage people to find exploits and report them to the developer.

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Now Playing: How Is Valorant So Far?

Players who believe they have found an exploit in Vanguard are encouraged to submit a report, and the minimum payout for a confirmed exploit is $250 USD. As part of the expansion of this program, Riot will pay up to $100,000 for "high quality reports" that demonstrate and detail exploits within Vanguard.

To get the money, you must provide a working proof of concept of the issue and a report detailing it. The exploit must also be new, and it must have been found within the latest version of Vanguard.

The Vanguard bounty program also has tiers for lower-level exploits that pay out $25,000, $35,000, $50,000, and $75,000. Go to the HackerOne website to see a full rundown of the program. Riot says it has already paid out more than $2 million USD in bounties since the bounty program began in 2014.

Some have criticized Riot's Vanguard for taking a step too far due to how the driver component of the software runs in kernel mode instead of user mode. This allows the Vanguard code to access your hardware, and people have raised questions and concerns about this.

Riot acknowledged these concerns but also pointed out that it cannot dive too deep into the technical specifics because doing so would potentially compromise Vanguard.

The developer said if Vanguard were limited to user mode, only "its capabilities would be compromised by a cheat running at a higher privilege level."

"Vanguard is a solution that will help us achieve the vision of competitive integrity while enabling us to continuously adapt our arsenal in the war against cheaters," Riot said, adding that Vanguard does not collect or hold onto personal information.

"Players have every right to question and challenge us, but let’s be clear--we wouldn't work here if we didn't deeply care about player trust and privacy and believe that Riot feels the same way," the developer said. "We're players just like you, and we wouldn't install programs on our computer that we didn’t have the utmost confidence in."

For lots more on Valorant, check out GameSpot's preview of the beta in the video above. The full game is due for release later this year on PC as a free-to-play title.

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