Riot Games has said it will not pay the ransom demanded by the attackers responsible for the security flaw revealed by the company last week.

“Today we received a ransom email. Needless to say, we won’t pay,” the video game publisher and developer said. said tuesday.

“While this attack has disrupted our build environment and may cause issues in the future, we above all remain confident that no player data or player personal information was compromised.”

While inside Riot Games systems, threat actors stole the source code for the League of Legends (LoL) multiplayer online battle arena, auto-battle game Teamfight Tactics ( TFT) and a legacy anti-cheat platform.

The LoL and TFT teams are studying how cheat developers could use the stolen data to create new tools and analyzing if patches are needed to fend off these malicious efforts.

The game’s source code stolen during the security breach also contains some pending release features, which may not reach the release stage, according to the game’s developer.

“While we hope some of these game modes and other changes will eventually make it to players, most of this content is in prototype and there is no guarantee it will ever be released,” Riot Games said.

Riot Games said it was working with law enforcement and outside consultants to investigate the attack and that a full report will be released detailing how its development environment was breached and what steps were taken to prevent it. that this does not happen again.

Today we received a ransom email. Needless to say we won’t pay.

While this attack disrupted our build environment and may cause issues in the future, most importantly we remain confident that no player data or personal player information was compromised.

2/7

– Riot Games (@riotgames) January 24, 2023

Last week, when the breach was revealed, the game’s publisher said the incident had a direct impact on its teams’ ability to release game patches, with some of them likely to be released. delayed accordingly.

“As our teams work hard on a fix, we expect this to impact our upcoming patch cadence across multiple games,” Riot Games said.

League Studio head Andrei van Roon also chimed in and said that nothing in LoL’s patch 13.2 release plan would be undone, but that they “maybe just have to move things around that can’t be moved.” corrected (e.g. art changes) for a later date instead.”

The Riot Games breach follows the hack of another major video game publisher, 2K Games, which said in September 2020 that attackers hacked into its help desk and infected some customers with malware. In October 2020, 2K warned its users that some of their information had been stolen and offered for sale online.

The same month, Rockstar Games was also hackedwith the attacker leaking videos of the unreleased Grand Theft Auto VI game and source code files for GTA V and GTA VI.

The hacker behind the Rockstar Games incident also claimed a cyberattack on Uberwhich attributed their breach to the Lapsus$ extortion group.

Lapsus$ is known to have hacked into the network of a series of prominent companies, including Microsoft, Nvidia, T-Mobile, Samsung, Uber, Vodafone, Ubisoft, Oktaand e-commerce giant Free market.

This cyber crime group has also leaked source code and proprietary data stolen from victims’ networks, leading to massive data breaches and leaks.