Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends and Teamfight tactics, has revealed that source code has been taken by hackers who are now demanding a ransom to be paid. The hackers also apparently have taken source code for an anti-cheat which is owned by the company.
It was only last week when Riot Games released information that a social engineering attack, which is usually the manipulation of somebody to release information, was done on a development environment. The company has since confirmed that the source code for League of Legends and TFT was compromised and taken. As part of the attack, a ransom email was sent to them, demanding a certain amount of money. In their first Tweet, they mentioned what had happened:
Following on from that, Riot said, “Today, we received a ransom email. Needless to say, we won’t pay.” and added, “While this attack disrupted our build environment and could cause issues in the future, most importantly we remain confident that no player data or player personal information was compromised.”
They are also concerned that this could result in further issues going forward. Riot said, ““Any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging,” and “Since the attack, we’ve been working to assess its impact on anticheat and to be prepared to deploy fixes as quickly as possible if needed. Our security teams and globally recognized external consultants continue to evaluate the attack and audit our systems. We’ve also notified law enforcement and are in active cooperation with them as they investigate the attack and the group behind it.”
Unfortunately, as this was a development environment which was hacked, there would have been several prototypes, such as new game modes but Riot says there will be things that will never be released. “The illegally obtained source code also includes a number of experimental features. While we hope some of these game modes and other changes eventually make it out to players, most of this content is in prototype and there’s no guarantee it will ever be released.”. Finally, in a final tweet regarding the situation, they confirmed that they were making good progress.
Overall, Riot Games have been completely transparent with everything that has happened. They are confident this has not affected any customer details or data and seem to be making good progress rectifying the situation, which is good to see from such a big gaming company. There will be further updates from both teams behind TFT and League of Legends, so expect further from us in the next couple of days.
