Riot Games hackers sell League of Legends source code for $700,000 on black market

^{Image: Riot Games}

Hackers are selling League of Legends’ source code and anti-cheat software for $700,000 on the black market, after Riot Games turned them down.

Riot Games was compromised by a group of hackers last month in a ‘social engineering attack,” which saw the hackers escape with source code for League of Legends. According to Motherboard, the hackers then demanded $10 million from Riot for the return of this source code, but the developer turned them down. Now, they’ve turned to the black market. 

According to Esports Heaven, the hackers stole Riot’s source code for games like League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. It also stole code for Packman, an old version of the anti-cheat software the company uses for its games, and code for more anti-cheat software specifically built for League’s Korean servers, codenamed Demacia. The hackers sent a ransom email to Riot in January, demanding $10 million dollars for the return of the source code, but Riot publicly turned them down. 

The hackers have since turned to the black market to profit from their ill-gotten gains, where they’re currently asking for $700,000 for the source code for both games and all the anti-cheat software they own. If the anti-cheat software finds its way into the hands of bad actors, Esports Heaven claims that it could be used to create more robust cheating tools and hacking programs – which would hurt Riot’s games and their players significantly. 

According to Esports Heaven, the files are being sold on the black market by a user named Arkat_001. The source code is being sold as a package of 572,000 files amounting to 72.4GB of data in total. As bad as that sounds, it could have been a lot worse. According to VX Underground, the hackers originally had their sights set on Vanguard, Riot’s anti-cheat software for Valorant. Vanguard is a pretty tough nut to crack as far as anti-cheat software goes, but its code could have caused a serious breach in the wrong hands. Fortunately, the hackers were kicked from Riot’s network before finding Vanguard’s source code. 

It’s important to note that while this source code could be damaging to Riot in the near future, it likely won’t have a lasting impact on the company’s games. Given that Riot has turned down the $10 million ransom wholesale, one has to assume that it has plans in place to deal with the consequences of this code leaking – if that happens at all.