Last week, the famous’ Moba game, League of Legends source code was stolen. This includes its auto chess spin-off, Teamfight Tactics. Riot posted all of the updates on their official Twitter page.
Earlier this week, systems in our development environment were compromised via a social engineering attack. We don’t have all the answers right now, but we wanted to communicate early and let you know there is no indication that player data or personal information was obtained.
— Riot Games (@riotgames) January 20, 2023
The developer claimed in the above series of tweets that the code was stolen in an attack on their servers last week. The hackers have made demands, that Riot says they won’t meet. Law enforcement authorities and Riot are both looking into the attack, but Riot is adamant that the hackers did not have access to the personal information of League of Legends players.
Why won’t Riot pay for the League of Legends source code?
Riot said: “Over the weekend, our analysis confirmed source code for League, TFT, and a legacy anti-cheat platform were exfiltrated by the attackers,”. They also mentioned that they won’t pay: “Today, we received a ransom email. Needless to say, we won’t pay.”
The firm warned that due to the interruption the hack brought about, League Of Legends may experience problems in the future. Riot stated that they will focus their efforts on limiting the likelihood of any new cheats emerging as a result of source code theft. Some test features in the stolen code might have been exposed by the thieves. Riot emphasized that “most of this content is in prototype and there’s no guarantee it will ever be released”.
This might also include some of the updates they previously announced, which we detailed a few weeks ago from their official site.
Internal security at Riot is analyzing how last week’s social engineering-based attack was successful with the help of outside specialists. Authorities are also looking into the breach, which Riot attributed to a gang rather than a single perpetrator. The business announced that it will soon publish a report that contains “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”.
Riot games laid off 46 staff members a day before the attack
Some people think that the League of Legends source code was stolen due to the layoffs. Several people from the recruiting, human resources, support and esports teams were part of the layoffs. This was posted on Jacob Wolf’s site, and the information was confirmed by a developer in an interview.
However, there is also a chance that the League of Legends source code theft had nothing to do with the layoffs, but that remains to be seen.
Truth be told, I really hope the data leak will not affect Teamfight tactics, because I personally love that game.
