Riot Games is the victim of a cyberattack: how League of Legends and other games were affected

Riot Games confirmed that the source code of LEagle of legends and Team fight tactics Stolen by cybercriminals, in addition to the anti-legacy platform.

The attack was first reported on January 20th, but this Tuesday, January 24th, they provided details that at this time do not affect the personal data of registered users of the company’s video games.

As it turned out, the theft of this information was done through social engineering Riot on their Twitter account and they are currently investigating to find a solution to the situation and details of the cyber attack.

“We don’t have all the answers at this time, but we wanted to let you know that there is no indication that they received player data or personal information,” the company said.

How will the incident affect video games?

Riot is the owner and developer League of Legends, TFT, Valorant, Legends of Runeterra and Wild RiftThese last two games are exclusive to mobile, so attackers can get a lot of information.

For now, the company has confirmed that the situation will affect the release of the 13.2 update, which players have been waiting for on January 25, in League of Legends.

The main goal of the company is to solve this incident to ensure the safety of the players, because getting the source code of the games can cause a variety of problems.

“Any disclosure of source code can increase the likelihood of new hackers emerging.” After an attack, we work to assess its impact on anti-cheat and be ready to implement corrections as quickly as possible if necessary.

It is important to note that the source code includes experimental features that Riot Still under development or these are just suggestions like game modes or changes that may or may not reach users.

The developer’s studio claims that they are getting help from the authorities specializing in cybercrime and that they have made enough progress to have news for players next week, such as the patches that were expected in LoL and TFT, because according to the person in charge of none of the league’s studios, the prepared changes will be canceled. Andrei Vanroon.

This attack occurs several hours after the onset League of Legends Latin American LeagueWhich will not affect his calendar so far and the tournament will start as usual on January 24 from 17:00 in Colombia and 19:00 in Argentina.

finally, Riot Games confirmed that they had received blackmail for the attack via e-mail. Although they did not disclose the details of this communication from the criminals, they confirmed that they do not intend to pay because “we are confident that no details or personal information of the players have been compromised”.

Cyber ​​attacks on video game studios

ESETA cybersecurity company has warned of an increase in these types of cases in the gaming sector as cybercriminals try to insert backdoors into their development environments to distribute malware as part of legitimate software.

“Cyber-attacks targeting popular game development companies and studios have increased significantly. Criminals use various techniques (phishing, malware, web application attacks, brute force, etc.) to launch attacks to steal sensitive user information, compromise platform accounts, or gain access to companies’ systems. Directly or indirectly, the goal of the attackers is economic,” he assures us Camilo Gutierrez Amaya, Head of ESET Latin America Laboratory.

An example of this was in 2022 Ubisoft And it was in 2021 electronic art. Both were attacked by the same group who stole personal information by tricking employees into using social engineering.

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