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Last week, video game developer Riot Games, which is behind popular games such as League of Legends and Valorant had its development environment compromised by threat actors through a social engineering attack. This week, the attackers demanded a $10 million ransom for source code stolen from League of Legends.
The LA-based publisher took to Twitter to declare that they will not pay the ransom.
Today, we received a ransom email. 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.
2/7
— Riot Games (@riotgames) January 24, 2023
Details on the Breach
As per BleepingComputer, the breach affected Riot’s ability to publish patches for its games. The source code for the Teamfight Tactics (TFT) auto battler game, a legacy anti-cheat framework, and the League of Legends (LoL) multiplayer online battle arena were all taken by the threat actors when they were inside the company’s computer systems.
The LoL and TFT teams are examining whether any fixes are required to prevent such malicious attempts and how cheat makers might utilize the stolen data to create new tools.
The source code stolen includes some features for LoL which are yet to be released, according to the game developer.
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,
Riot Games (Source)
A detailed report on how its development environment was compromised and the steps taken to prevent this from happening again will be made public, according to Riot Games, which stated that it is working with law enforcement and other consultants to examine the incident.
The Ransom Was $10 Million
It has been reported that the hackers asked Riot Games for $10 million to not leak the stolen source code and delete it from their servers.
We have obtained your valuable data, including the precious anti-cheat source code and the entire game code for League of Legends and its tools, as well as Packman, your usermode anti-cheat… We understand the significance of these artifacts and the impact their release to the public would have on your major titles, Valorant and League of Legends. In light of this, we are making a small request for an exchange of $10,000,000.
Hacker’s Ransomware Note to Riot Games (Source)
The gaming industry has been assaulted by threat actors recently. In September 2022, 2K Games was breached and some customers got infected with malware.
Another notorious case in recent memory is the GTA VI leak, which also happened in September 2022. The attacker leaked videos and source code files of the unreleased game. It is believed that the hacker which breached Rockstar Games is associated with the extorsion group Lapsus$.
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Cristian is a Content Editor & Creator at Heimdal®, where he developed a deep understanding of the digital threat landscape. His style resonates with both technical and non-technical readers, proof being in his skill of communicating cybersecurity norms effectively, in an easy-to-understand manner.
