Last weekend, Riot Games told fans of its games that it had been hit with a social engineering attack that led to the compromise of its development environment systems, which initially led to the company’s game patch rollout, though no player info was affected. As of Tuesday night, the company has released more detailed information, and as it turns out, the hackers are attempting to extort the company for money.
“Over the weekend, our analysis confirmed source code for League [of Legends], TFT, and a legacy anticheat platform were exfiltrated by the attackers,” the company tweeted. “Today, we received a ransom email. Needless to say, we won’t pay. 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.”
“Truthfully, any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging. 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. 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. 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. We’re committed to transparency and will release a full report in the future detailing the attackers’ techniques, the areas where Riot’s security controls failed, and the steps we’re taking to ensure this doesn’t happen again. 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.”
