talk-data.com talk-data.com

P

Speaker

Phillip Koskinas

1

talks

Director of Anti-Cheat Riot Games

Originally a cheat developer himself, Phillip Koskinas switched teams at the very last second to avoid jailtime, ultimately helping carve the very first League of Legends banwaves from the collective meat of the guilty. After Phillip successfully escaped the pain dimension, and completed the punishment of writing three-hundred thousand ETLs, he eventually ascended to lead Riot’s Anti-Cheat team, leading development of Riot's critical anti-cheat technology, Vanguard, on nearly every title since, including: League of Legends, VALORANT, Wild Rift, 2XKO, and Team Fight Tactics. Whenever we try to fire him, something howls in the basement.

Bio from: Data + AI Summit 2025

Filtering by: Data + AI Summit 2025 ×

Filter by Event / Source

Talks & appearances

Showing 1 of 1 activities

Search activities →
Future of Anti-Cheat With Riot Games

As online gaming evolves, so do cheating methods that exploit client-server vulnerabilities. Traditional anti-cheat, such as kernel-level drivers and runtime detections, has long been the primary defense. However, advanced cheats like Direct Memory Access (DMA) exploits and AI-powered Computer Vision (CV) hacks increasingly render client-side detection ineffective. This presentation examines the escalating arms race between cheat creators and developers, highlighting client-side limitations. With CV cheats mimicking human behavior, anti-cheat must shift toward server-side, data-driven detection. By leveraging AI, machine learning, and behavioral analytics to analyze player patterns, input anomalies, and decision inconsistencies, future solutions can move beyond static detection to adaptive security models, ensuring fair play at scale. The session will also include real-life examples from Riot Games’ anti-cheat efforts, specifically insights and case studies from the development and operation of Riot Vanguard, to illustrate how these strategies are applied in practice.