On January 20, Riot Games revealed that they had undergone a cyber attack where systems in their development environment were compromised via a social engineering attack. Today, in an update on the situation, they have confirmed that source code for League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, and a legacy anticheat platform were taken. Riot also said that they have received a ransom demand from those responsible. This attack has temporarily affected Riot’s ability to release new content.
Today, we received a ransom email,” Riot said. “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.”
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,” the studio wrote. “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.”