League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics source code obtained by hackers

Riot Games has confirmed the source code for League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, and a legacy anti-cheat platform have been obtained by hackers after a cyberattack last week.

On January 20, 2023, the company posted a tweet explaining that systems in its development environment were "compromised" via a social engineering attack, and has now said it's being held to ransom after the culprits obtained the source code for some of its biggest franchises.

The company said it won't be paying the ransom, but acknowledged the attack could cause issues in the future. It also said that it remains confident that no player data or personal information has been compromised.

"Truthfully, any exposure of source code can increase the likelihood of new cheats emerging. 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," wrote the studio on social media.

"The illegally obtained source code also includes a number of 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."

Riot said its security teams and external consultants are still evaluating the attack and auditing its systems. The company has also notified law enforcement and is aiding them as they investigate the attack and the group behind it.

"We’re committed to transparency and will release a full report in the future detailing the attackers’ techniques, the areas where Riot’s security controls failed, and the steps we’re taking to ensure this doesn’t happen again," continued the studio.

"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."