Professional esports integrity has improved. Players can no longer use USB injection devices or firmware-based recoil macros because Secure Boot + Vanguard flags them as suspicious.

So, take a deep breath, reboot into your BIOS, and flip that switch. The cheaters are praying you don't. And in the ranked lobbies of VALORANT , that’s a prayer we are happy to answer. Have you successfully enabled Secure Boot? Still getting the error? Drop your motherboard model in the comments below.

Without Secure Boot, a cheat could load a rootkit into the UEFI. Vanguard would look at the running system, see no anomalies, and let the cheater play. With Secure Boot on, that UEFI rootkit is stopped before it ever reaches the RAM. The backlash against the Secure Boot requirement was fierce. Players took to Reddit and Twitter with valid concerns:

The short answer is no. The long answer involves kernel-level drivers, billion-dollar cheating industries, and a fundamental shift in how PC gaming handles security. Let’s break down exactly what VALORANT’s Secure Boot requirement is, why it exists, and how to fix it without compromising your PC’s safety. To understand Secure Boot, you first have to understand the enemy. In the early 2010s, cheating software was relatively simple. Bots would read pixel colors; aimbots would move your mouse. Traditional anti-cheat software (like Easy Anti-Cheat or BattlEye) worked by scanning the game’s memory .