Riot Games, the developer and publisher of video games like League of Legends and Valorant, will have to delay updates and patches to their games after they your development environment has been compromised by a computer attack.
The publisher revealed the incident in a Twitter thread late Friday and promised to keep customers informed with what it finds out in the ongoing investigation.
“Earlier this week the systems in our development environment were compromised by a social engineering attack”says company. “We do not have all the answers at this time, but we wanted to communicate it promptly and report that we have no indication that player data has been obtained or their personal information”.
Earlier this week, systems in our development environment were compromised via a social engineering attack. 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.
— Riot Games (@riotgames) January 20, 2023
Riot Games added that the hack had affected its ability to release content, updates or patches for its games. And it is vital in games like LoL as it is one of the most played multiplayer online battle arena titles in the industry.
The big game studios, with tens of millions of followers, are a prime target for cybercriminals. 2K alerted last September that its customer support system was compromised by unknown attackers to send fake emails to distribute RedLine malware and others like Bandai Namco were extorted after a successful Ransomware attack.
Phishing, the second biggest cyber threat after Ransomware, has also been widely used against game studios. We saw an example in the theft of Steam accounts and in general that of other massive gaming services with malicious campaigns that use a phishing technique known as Browser-in-the-Browser which is gaining popularity among hackers.
As for the social engineering that Riot Games says was used against its development environment, it has become a very popular technique among cybercriminals and we have seen it in recent attacks against other companies such as Twitter, MailChimp, Robinhood, Okta or Uber.
Take care of your game accounts because the bad guys are lurking, especially with multiplayer titles like LoL, CS, Dota 2 or PUBG.
