A leading US gaming company is primed to respond to any new cheats that may emerge for its titles following a ransomware compromise last week.
California-based Riot Games said yesterday that it had received a ransom demand, which it would not pay. However, the data taken by its extorters may create problems for the firm in the future if it leads to developers producing cheats for popular games like League of Legends.
The Tencent-owned firm confirmed that source code for League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics and “a legacy anti-cheat platform” were taken by its attackers.
“Truthfully, any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging,” Riot Games admitted on Twitter. “Since the attack, we’ve been working to assess its impact on anti-cheat and to be prepared to deploy fixes as quickly as possible if needed.”
The firm added that threat actors also stole source code related to some 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,” it said.
“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 gaming developer first revealed news of the breach late last week, claiming that unspecified “systems in our development environment” were compromised via social engineering tactics.
It said the breach had temporarily halted all releases and updates, including a patch for League of Legends.
However, things now appear to be back on track.
“Our security teams and globally recognized external consultants continue to evaluate the attack and audit our systems. We’ve also notified law enforcement and are in active cooperation with them as they investigate the attack and the group behind it,” the firm concluded.
“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.”
Security watchers will be pleasantly surprised by the firm’s transparency, with a full report promised in time dissecting the attack and what went wrong from a security perspective.
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