Hackers stole League of Legends source code, ‘new cheats may be on the way’

Hackers stole the source code of League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics and a ‘legacy anti-cheat platform’ in an attack last week. Riot Games confirms this, which warns that this could lead to new cheats for its games.

The hackers have asked Riot Games for a ransom, but the company says on Twitter not to go into this. The attack forced the developer to postpone game patches in the past and the company warns that the hack could also cause problems in the future. “To be fair, any disclosure of source code can increase the chance of new cheats.” Riot says it has been investigating the cheat impact since the attack and will release fixes if necessary.

No user data was stolen in the attack, the company says. However, the source code may contain traces of upcoming or experimental features. “While we hope some of these game modes and other changes will eventually reach players, the majority of this content is still in the prototype stage and there are no guarantees we’ll ever release it.”

The company says it is still investigating the attack, in collaboration with external consultants and police services. Riot also wants to publish a full report on the attack in the future, detailing how the hackers gained access to, among other things, the source code. So far, Riot has only said that the hackers got into the company’s systems through social engineering.

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.

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— Riot Games (@riotgames) January 24, 2023