Attack on Riot Games: Hackers steal source code

Riot Games has shared details of the recent cyber attack with the community. The company’s official Twitter account states that they received a ransom note. Riot Games has refused to pay the money and has now clarified the potential consequences for players.

The developers are now working with the police to investigate the attack. According to the company, the stolen data don’t pose any threat to regular players, but rather is a source code for unspecified Riot Games products.

What does this mean for us gamers and can we continue playing as normal?

Will more attacks come?

Riot Games developers assume that there will be more attacks because the hackers have not yet been able to steal anything useful. However, they are already in the process of updating the defense systems to curb future damage. Riot also found that the hackers stole some experimental features, mostly prototypes that will never see the light of day.

Nonetheless, League of Legends and TFT were affected by the attack with the claim coming in an email shortly after.

Are there consequences for players?

Even though Riot has assured that player data such as passwords or credit cards are not at risk, new in-game defenses could appear as a result of the incident. The developers have promised that they will now be watching closely for new cheats finding their way into the game and if that happens, they will develop new anti-cheat software.

Players have also been first reassured that the next LoL patch, update 13.2, which is scheduled for January 25th, is still set to ship on time. Unfortunately, that has changed with patch 13.2 postponed by one day. The hack also prompted Riot Games to move some patch content. Namely, the Aurelion Sol Rework and Ahri’s VFX Rework have been pushed to Patch 13.3 (February 8).

In fact, the server in EU-West did not run as smoothly as usual yesterday and the game lobbies were partially bugged or had severe lags. We can only hope that the perpetrators will be caught quickly and that we will soon be able to play LoL normally again.

Header: Riot Games