If Secure Boot is off, you must enable it in your motherboard's BIOS/UEFI settings.
A week passed. Then two. Alex played other games—Apex, CS2, even booted up an old Source mod. But nothing scratched the same itch. The craving became a low-grade fever. They started dreaming in utility rotations. They’d hear a car backfire and think, That’s a Chamber trap.
After the match, they minimized the game and opened the Event Viewer. A habit. They scrolled through the System logs and found what they were looking for: Vanguard.sys loaded successfully. Secure Boot validation passed. A clean, sterile line of code.
Cheaters often use sophisticated methods to bypass anti-cheat, such as "bootkits." These are viruses that load before Windows even starts. If a cheat loads before the operating system, it can hide from or manipulate Vanguard.
The next morning, Alex wrote a post on that same subreddit. Not a rant, not a defense, just a question: “I enabled Secure Boot. Then I checked my logs and found an unsigned driver trying to load. Does Valorant need it? Maybe not. But do you need to know what’s actually running on your PC? Yeah. You really do.”
The pop-up had appeared three days ago: “This build of Vanguard requires Secure Boot to be enabled.” No warning, no gradual phase-in. Just a hard stop. Alex had stared at the message, then down at their custom-built PC—a Frankenstein’s monster of second-hand parts, overclocked RAM, and a motherboard from 2019 that ran a custom BIOS. Secure Boot was off. It had always been off. Turning it on meant wrestling with UEFI settings, potentially bricking their Linux dual-boot, and—the real sin—admitting defeat.
Secure Boot is a security standard developed by PC manufacturers (UEFI). Its job is simple: it ensures that your computer boots using only software that is trusted by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM).
The problem was, they missed Valorant. They missed the crisp headshot ping , the frantic defuse clutches, the salty all-chat. But principle was principle. So they waited.
If you're still unsure about Secure Boot or encounter issues with Valorant, you can:
