A hacker has managed to obtain the source code of two games from Riot Games, namely League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. A ransom was demanded, and the studio claims to have refused to pay. At the time of writing these lines, the servers for all of the American giant’s games are offline.
After massive hacking of GTA 6 and Rockstar servers, it’s Riot Games’ turn to be the victim of a new attack. As the studio explains in a long thread on Twitter, a hack managed to sseize source codes of League of Legends, Teamfight Tactif and the American video game giant’s anti-cheat platform.
Riot Games assures it, no player data has been compromised
According to Riot’s statements, this cyber attack took place on January 20 and presumably, the hacker would have managed to obtain this sensitive data through social engineering. In other words, the attacker used different schemes to approach a Riot Games employee who has access to the studio’s systems. Social engineering hacks are commonplace. This technique has led to the piracy of GTA 6but also of Cyberpunk 2077 in February 2021.
According to Riot Games, no personal player or account data was compromised in this attack. Nevertheless, the studio specifies that the two source codes of the game include experimental features (at the prototype stage) which could see the light of day on the two titles.
Also read: League of Legends, Valorant and all other Riot Games games join Xbox Game Pass
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.
— Riot Games (@riotgames) January 24, 2023
Anti-cheat concerns
In addition to the fear of seeing these new features end up on the web, the main concerns relate to the source code of Riot’s anti-cheat software. Because, the development teams fear the appearance of new cheats. “Since the attack, we have been working to assess its impact on anticheat and be ready to deploy fixes as quickly as possible if needed.” specifies the studio on Twitter.
Of course, Riot Games’ IT security department is currently cooperating with consultants and the authorities to investigate the attack and its perpetrators. On the social network, the American company announces the forthcoming publication of a complete report in order to detailthe attacker’s techniques, areas where Riot’s security checks failed, and the steps it intends to take to prevent this from happening.”
Note that players are already feeling the consequences of this attack. At the time of writing these lines, servers for all games stamped Riot, whether League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics or Valorant are offline (and this since 5 p.m. this Tuesday, January 24, 2023). In addition, the deployment of the next major LOL and TFT updates has been postponed to February 8, 2023.