Riot Games, the developers of Valorant, have declared war on cheaters and hackers. But why not win over the best opponents for themselves?
What is recruitment all about? According to a report by Vice, two hackers wanted to dig deep into the code of Valorant’s anti-cheat software to find vulnerabilities. This is an important step to develop powerful cheats that can bypass the robust cheat protection Vanguard.
However, deep in the code, they found a file named Stubs.dll. It contained a mysterious message in ASCII format. Besides displaying the company logo, there was a clear offer to the hackers:
Protected by Packman, a Riot Games product. Developed with love by the anti-cheat team. We are always looking for talented individuals. If you found this message, we kindly ask you to take a look at our job offers. Maybe you will find something of interest.
Hackers are the best defense against hackers
Why is Riot doing this? An old saying goes roughly, “If you can’t beat them, let them work for you.” And that seems to be what Riot is aiming for here. Because anyone who is really good enough to crack the notorious anti-cheat code of Valorant – at least to this extent – would be a strong ally against less skilled hackers.
Riot Games already has one of the best anti-cheat teams in the industry in their crusade against cheaters, and they could certainly use more highly talented software artists to stay at the top. An employee from Riot commented:
The hope is that people who do [hacking] as a hobby or out of curiosity might want to have a chance to make it a career. The people who do it to sell cheats for profit would probably not be interested anyway.
So they only want the “good” hackers, those who do it purely for fun, not the “bad” ones who ruin the fun for other players by selling cheats to them.
How little fun Riot seems to understand in the fight against their arch-enemies, the cheaters, is shown by the draconian penalties. Because anyone caught cheating can say goodbye to Valorant forever.
