Over the years, plenty of companies have had issues where their servers containing account data have been compromised. Blizzard, Valve, Microsoft… you name it, they’ve been hacked. Now the League of Legends team’s turn.
On Saturday, Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck made an announcement in the League of Legends news area that hackers were able to access some player information on the League of Legends servers. It was determined that the hackers gained access to “certain player data” on some EU West and EU Nordic & East databases, and that the critical data received included email address, the encrypted account password, summoner name, date of birth, and for some players, their first and last name and their encrypted security question and answer. However, they made sure to note that the security question and answer is no longer used in their account recovery process. Luckily, no payment or billing information was included in the breach.
With that being said, Merill and Beck said that they’ll be notifying all the players affected by email, urging them to change their passwords. The security exploit was fixed, but with the information that the hackers received, they could target those players with phishing attacks in an attempt to gain full control of their account. It’s always a serious issue whenever a game is compromised like this, and this is a good reminder on why you must always be vigilant. That’s why if you receive any sort of email that tells you to click on a link and enter your information under the guise of “security” or something, don’t do it. Also, if you have a simple password, one that is less than 8 characters long, all lowercase, and with no numbers, change it and make it into something that you can remember but that other people won’t be able to guess. Capitalize random letters, and sometimes change out entire letters for numbers. Never use anything like “password”, “12345”, or “qwerty” for your password. Those are by far the most used passwords, and will likely get your account stolen right from underneath you.