Riot Games’ game development systems hit by cyberattack, delay in updates expected

Riot Games, the creators of popular battle royale games Valorant and League of Legends (LoL), confirmed it was hit by a cyberattack last week that has impacted its systems used for game development.  

The US-based gaming firm said that the attack has impacted the ability to release new content while assuring that no personal data of its users was compromised. This means the release of new updates across games including Valorant and League of Legends might get impacted.  

“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 said in a Twitter post on Saturday.  

“Unfortunately, this has temporarily affected our ability to release content. While our teams are working hard on a fix, we expect this to impact our upcoming patch cadence across multiple games,” the firm added in a follow-up post.  

A social engineering attack is a form of cyberattack in which attackers conduct background research on potential targets, looking for a point of entry. Attackers then impersonate a trusted person or brand to convince the target to share sensitive information like username and password and then use it to gain entry to company systems. 

Riot Games’ Valorant and LoL are two of the most widely played multiplayer battle royal games with close to 17 million and over 11 million active players, respectively, as per the Tracker Network data. 

Its games are also gaining traction within the eSports community in India. Last November, Riot Games partnered with eSports tournament organiser Galaxy Racer for a Valorant India Invitational tournament in Hyderabad, which had a prize pool of $100,000 (approx. ₹81 lakh).  

This was one of the biggest prize pools for a PC game in a market that has more mobile gamers.  

The growing interest in gaming has also attracted a lot of unwanted attention from cybercriminals.  

Cyberattacks on gaming firms have more than doubled between Q1 2021 and Q1 2022 and accounted for 37% of all distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks, according to a report by Akamai Technologies, published last August.  

The report shows that India was the third most targeted country after the US and Switzerland.  

Last September, unseen gameplay footage of the upcoming game in the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series was leaked online after a hacker breached the network of game publisher Rockstar, one of the biggest gaming companies in the world.