This article is more than 1 year old

Passwords pillaged from League of Legends wand-strokers

Euro gamers' very private jewels sniffed by hackers

Passwords, email addresses, dates of birth and other sensitive data have been plundered from the player databases of fantasy strategy game League of Legends.

Publisher Riot Games sent emails to its online role-players in West, Nordic and East Europe, and posted on its website, to warn that hackers had raided their account information.

Players’ data including email addresses, passwords, summoner names, dates of birth and, in some cases, real names and security Q&A, was stolen but financial info was safe, Riot said.

“Absolutely no payment or billing information of any kind was included in the breach,” the company promised, although it did admit that the security on the data that was stolen wasn’t that hot.

“Even though we store passwords in encrypted form only, our security investigation determined that more than half of the passwords were simple enough to be at risk of easy cracking,” Riot stated.

The gaming firm said it had now patched up the hole the hackers had exploited, and that they would use new techniques to secure data in future.

“We'll continue to invest in security measures, including password hashing and data encryption, state-of-the-art firewalls, SSL, security ninjas, and other security measures to make your info safer,” the games firm stated. “We've been humbled by this experience and know that nothing guarantees the security of internet-connected systems such as League of Legends. We can simply promise to try our very best to protect your data.”

Riot advised players to change their password immediately and watch out for phishes.

In November the company claimed it had 11.5 million active monthly users for warrior'n'wizards multiplayer League of Legends, with more than 30 million gamers registered in total. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like