Is Valorant Spyware?

so is valerant malware is it a CCP root kit or spyware or just another game well today we have a test system and we're going to monitor it and try to answer this question definitively once and for all which hopefully will also answer questions about similar applications and anti-che software in general are invasive applications a risk to your security and what should you do about it so first off I want to say it should be kind of obvious but when you install valerant on your computer it makes a lot of connections and I mean a lot most of these are to the servers across the riot CDN network but what kind of data is it sending and where well that's a difficult question to answer because the data itself is going to be encrypted so you're not going to be able to tell even if I were to trace some of these individual connections like the IP addresses that it connects to most of these are going to be Amazon servers in a nearby location so you can't really tell where the data is really going after that but here are some facts if we do a quick search the riot games the company behind ferent is owned completely by the Chinese Mega giant 10 cent now asking if tens Cent is interested in spying on you is like asking if the dog wants its bone in certain situations the answer may be no but in general it's a resounding yes so we're going to continue with our investigation of the behavior but knowing the ownership where we can't find answers we're going to have to assume the worst so let's start with the client and what it does does we take a look at process Explorer and examine all the valerant processes we have the riot Client Services seems perfectly safe and if we examine the loaded dlls nothing strange here either now if we take a look at vanard which is the actual anti-che application this particular exe doesn't really do anything this is based in program files and it's only a simple three mag application but do not make the mistake of assuming that this is the Vanguard application this is the notification application for Vanguard the real anti-che is embedded deep within your system as a driver now where you are going to see it is if we ignore all of this and take a deeper look at the system and here we have a list of dlls that are loaded including drivers like AMD drivers kernel drivers display drivers Bluetooth and if we scroll through this list we're eventually going to find Vanguard vdk dois which is a kernel mode driver by Riot games so when you see discussions on Reddit about ferent being malware spyware most people just look at this and panic cuz this is essentially like a root kit it's a driver that's embedded within your system but it's also important to have some perspective here so I want to look at a competitor to valerant Counter Strike 2 and their face it anti-che so if we head over to my system where I do have faets anti-che running and similarly look at the system we are also going to find the faet anti-che loaded as a system driver so this Behavior itself is not unique to Vanguard if you want an application to be able to Monitor and police what's happening on your system it has to be embedded in the system and it's the same reason the next thing on list is malware bites anti-ransomware protection now this is again one of things that people on Reddit when they see kasperski install a driver like this like oh it's Russian spyware and completely ignore the fact that every other AV needs to have their driver embedded there as well but here's the thing that makes ferin different face at Santi cheet can be turned off at any time and if I wanted to I could simply relaunch it opening the app but with valerant if I want to go ahead and exit out of Vanguard it gives me a warning saying that the game depends on its functionality and will stop working until I restart my computer and that is actually correct so if I go ahead and it I can no longer play the game and if we try there's an air message saying that I need to reboot the computer and this is a huge difference because effectively is someone who wants to play valerant needs to have a Vanguard running on their system all the time whether they're playing the game or not you could be browsing the internet for 6 hours before you decide to get into a valerant game and vanguard's going to be running the whole time if you want to be able to quickly start up and load your game when you want to play now for you technical folk they're also different levels of Kernel access and it turns out valerin needs very significant kernel access and that's one of the excuses as to why it needs to load up with the system when you restart but that's not convincing for me especially considering there are other applications that manage to do it without and then when you add a nefarious and user license agreement that includes a forced arbitration so you can't even have a class action lawsuit against them I don't know but that just sounds a little bit messed up I can't look into these connections and tell you if they're spying on you the whole time or if they're only sending information when the game is launched we simply don't have that access but ask yourself if you want to run 10 cent software 24/7 on your computer in theory monitor everything you do if I were an anti-che software why would I need to be running on someone's computer the whole time simply doesn't make sense and I think this is what we need to pay more attention to the behaviors that we're being forced into not necessarily the fact that loads a kernel level driver because applications do that what concerns me more is they have set up the system in a way that people are going to have this application from 10cent running on their computer the whole time whether or not they're playing valerant and I'm just not convinced of the reasons for it so look if you really enjoy playing valerant what I would suggest is just exit Vanguard whenever you stop playing valerant I know it's going to be a little bit more inconvenient to have to restart your system when you want to start playing but I don't think you should give an anti-che application a permanent place in your memory and as a principle I think it makes sense to ask why an application is doing what it's doing if you're an AV it makes sense for you to want to have a driver to monitor everything all the time but if you're an anti-che for a game you only need to be running when the game is running now of course this could all just be a technical implementation thing but the more I think about it 10cent Chinese ownership data collection and then hm an anti-che system that conveniently is set up in a way that in order to have a good gaming experience you just need to let it run on your computer the whole time I don't know there's something about that that puts me off it just seems to line up too conveniently for a data collection company like tenset but let me know your thoughts in the comments below and let me know if you enjoy these kinds of analysis videos now since we did notice the uh malare bites driver I thought this would be a great video to show the newest version so there is sponsor they have a brand new UI with a very select dark mode you have all your devices visible here you have a VPN if you subscribe to that you also obviously have all of the advanced realtime protection features and some of you who know malare bites from back in the day you might think of it as a second opinion scanner but of course now it's a fully fledged security product with its own ransomware protection along with and this is my personal favorite not something a lot of products have which is the ability to block penetration testing attacks so this brings a lot of the Enterprise security features to your home product if you turn this on so if you haven't looked at Mal bites in a while definitely check them out using the link in description I'm sure we'll be doing an independent test of this in the future but hey good on them for also supporting some of our educational content so show them some love and just to be clear none of this is scripted I'm just giving you my thoughts on it and for the actual security tests do watch our reviews on the PC security Channel please like and share this video If you enjoyed it spread the word as we all know ferent newb cartoon un game go play Counterstrike this is Leo thank you so much for watching and as always stay informed stay secure

Channel: The PC Security Channel

Views: 719,254

Keywords: The PC Security Channel, TPSC, cybersecurity, cyber security, computer security, internet security, antivirus, anti malware, ransomware, trojan, virus, PUP, best antivirus, learn cybersecurity, hacking, hack, security, technology, cyber insurance, cybersecurity degree, best EDR, EDR, valorant, is valorant safe, is valorant spyware, is valorant malware, valorant spying, games spying on you, PC games, Valorant vs Counter strike, tencent, riot games malware, vanguard malware

Id: UqLI1xKc-L4

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024