Skip to main content

League of Legends source code exposed in Riot cyberattack

The company received a ransom email, but confirms that player personal information wasn't compromised

Riot Games has received a ransom email after hackers stole source code for League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics.

The attack also targeted its legacy anticheat platform, the company said in a tweet explaining the incident.

"Needless to say, we won't pay," Riot said of the ransom email. "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."

The firm added that it's been working to assess the leak's impact on anticheat as "any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging," it said.

As part of the leak, "experimental features" were also exposed, with Riot clarifying that "most of this content is in prototype and there’s no guarantee it will ever be released."

The cyberattack was reported to law enforcement, the company continued, and an investigation is ongoing, with Riot due to release a full report about the attack "in the future," including where its security failed and "the steps [it's] taking to ensure this doesn’t happen again."

Riot first revealed the attack on January 20, describing it as a "social engineering attack." Patch releases for both League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics have been pushed back for the time being.

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Read this next

Marie Dealessandri avatar
Marie Dealessandri: Marie joined GamesIndustry.biz in 2019 to head its Academy section. A journalist since 2012, she started in games in 2016. She can be found (rarely) tweeting @mariedeal, usually on a loop about Baldur’s Gate and the Dead Cells soundtrack. GI resident Moomins expert.
In this article

League of Legends

PC

Teamfight Tactics

PC

Related topics