League of Legends Joins the Legion of Hacked Websites

It's crazy just how many sites have been leaked the past couple of days. First, there was the LinkedIn password hash debacle, where close to 6.5 million users of the social network had their passwords leaked on the world wide web. That was followed by 1.5 million user accounts getting compromised on online dating site eHarmony.

Joining the legion of hacked sites is online gaming site League of Legends, a real-time strategy action video game developed by Riot Games. It's one of the most popular online games, too, as it has over 32 million registered users as of November 2011.

League of Legends is divided into three regions: North America, EU West and EU Nordic, and East. Players from the second region were sent a warning email from Riot, who also published a security announcement informing users that hackers had gained access into the EU West and EU Nordic user systems.

After thorough and urgent investigation with help from independent security experts, we have determined that hackers gained access to certain personal player data. 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.

-- League of Legends Account Security Alert

Users are advised to change the passwords to their accounts as soon as possible. Riot doesn't provide any more details about how the hack took place or just how many user passwords were compromised. Regardless, Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, who serve as Riot's CEO and president, respectively, apologized to users for the breach and for the inconvenience.