Riot Games confirms ransomware

Riot Games refuses to pay the ransom demanded by hackers who targeted the gaming company in an unexpected social engineering attack last week.

The popular game developer shared the news about a ransom email they received, while also reiterating that player data had not been compromised in the attack.

The attack had shut down production offices late Friday interfering with the company's scheduled patch releases for multiple games.

It was also revealed to followers that hackers were able to steal sensitive source code from two fan-favorite games, League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, as well as from one of their legacy anti-cheat platforms.

Riot Games continued the Twitter thread claiming they have been working to assess any impact on the anticheat platform and were prepared to deploy fixes as needed.

"The illegally obtained source code also includes a number of experimental features," although some of the features were still in development and not necessarily guaranteed to be part of future releases, Riot Games said.

Finally, the California-based firm confirmed both in-house security teams and outside consultants were actively working with law enforcement, while substantial progress in the investigation had been made.

Riot Games said they plan to release a full report "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."

Patch cadence is expected to return to normal by the end of the week.

Riot Games has 2.7 million followers on Twitter. Many followers praised the company for their transparency throughout the hacking incident.

The popular developing, publishing, and e-tournament gaming company has over 4500 employees based in over 20 offices worldwide, according to its website.

There has been no further information on where or how the social engineering attack originated or how much the hackers had demanded in payment.