UPDATE 1/24: Riot Games says it lost the source code to the multiplayer title League of Legends and TeamFight Tactics, as well as the computer code for a “legacy anticheat platform."
Original Story:
Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends and Valorant, suffered a hack last week that’s forcing the company to delay game updates.
The hacker infiltrated the company’s development systems through a “social engineering attack,” Riot Games tweeted. That means the culprits likely tricked an employee into either giving up their corporate login information or installing malware on their computer to achieve access.
The good news is that Riot Games has so far uncovered no evidence that user data was compromised during the intrusion. “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,” the company said.
However, the intrusion did disrupt the company’s ability to release game updates. “While our teams are working hard on a fix, we expect this to impact our upcoming patch cadence across multiple games,” the studio said.
This includes potentially delaying the upcoming 13.2 patch for League of Legends, which was supposed to roll out on Wednesday. In a separate Twitter post, Riot Games noted: “The League team is working to stretch the limits of what we can hotfix in order to deliver the majority of the planned and tested balance changes on time still.”
Studio head Andrei van Roon added: “Nothing that would have been in 13.2 will be canceled, we might just have to move things that can't be hotfixed (e.g. art changes) to a later date instead.”
Riot Games, which is owned by Chinese company Tencent, didn't respond to a request for comment, making the full scope of the intrusion unclear. But the need to pause game patches suggests the developer is still getting a handle on which internal systems were accessed and potentially manipulated. It could also mean the hacker encrypted some systems using ransomware.
In recent months, game developers have experienced their fair share of data breaches. Last July, Elden Ring’s publisher Bandai Namco suffered a ransomware hack. Then in September, Rockstar Games experienced its own intrusion that led the culprit to leak details about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 game.