Riot Games

League of Legends source code stolen, Riot Games reveals a ransom attempt

Riot Games has declined any payment to the thieves for the ransom of League of Legend's source code, and already contacted authorities about the situation.

Update: Jan 24th, 2023 21:57 CET

Last week, Riot Games announced that their development environment had suffered a cyber attack. The studio promised to investigate the situation and keep users informed about any possible vulnerability to their privacy. A couple of days after, the developers of Valorant and League of Legends have revealed that they’ve been a victim of hacking: the LoL source code has been stolen by the attackers and they’ve been contacted with a ransom attempt.

“Today, we received a ransom email. Needless to say, we won’t pay,” stated the company on their official Twitter account. “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. “

As promised, we wanted to update you on the status of last week’s cyber attack. Over the weekend, our analysis confirmed source code for League, TFT, and a legacy anticheat platform were exfiltrated by the attackers.

1/7 https://t.co/IogE05HaD1
— Riot Games (@riotgames) January 24, 2023

The future may have a bit of trouble

The studio revealed that due to the source code being leaked, it’s quite possible that new cheats might pop up for the game in the coming months. However, they’ve already taken this into account, and have been steadily working to become prepared to respond to this with fixes and patches for their anticheat systems as they’re needed.

According to Riot Games, the stolen code also included a number of “experimental features” that are meant as prototypes for future content for the game. And while many of it is intended to come to the title eventually, they also remind fans that there’s no guarantee any of it will be officially released. Their security teams and consultants continue to assess the impact this may have in the future, and are working with law enforcement to investigate the attack and the group behind it.

Their statement concluded in a positive note: “We’ve made a lot of progress since last week and we believe we’ll have things repaired later in the week, which will allow us to remain on our regular patch cadence going forward. The League and TFT teams will update you soon on what this means for each game.”

League of Legends is available for download completely free on PC, and also has a mobile version dubbed Wild Rift for iOS and Android devices.

Source | Riot Games