The Hacker Who Went to War With Riot Games

The hacker who keeps riot games awake at night.

Find the full write up and original reporting from hall of fame esports journalist Richard Lewis:

As well as his substack for more recent work:
And youtube/twitch:

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#riotgames #hacker #documentary

[Drakenborn]

I've worked in IT and the senior at Riot not changing his password when everyone else has to do so is EXTREMELY consistent with senior level behavior at companies. They will whine and scream that there should be "absolutely no exceptions" and "everyone must change their password" (which is actually good policy btw) while insisting that you allow them to keep their password. Their primary issue is ALWAYS the same and can be found in virtually every company across the planet: they don't want experts to guide them to good policy decisions but rather to be told that their decisions are good policy regardless of how insanely stupid they may be. That way they consistently say "we consulted with experts" to the employees/public and will have someone to point the finger at when their stupid decision inevitably bites them in the ass publicly.

[RLewisReports]

A great adaptation of a piece of work I always rated as one of my best. Thanks for bringing it to a new audience.

[lucynyu]

My account was hacked in 2017 and at least the person who stole my account for two weeks did very well in ranked... Thanks Hacker.

[martharunstheworld]

So, while he was out on bail, Jason was continuing his antics. And nothing happened to him. He probably realized that. What a world we live in. Really good video!

[lane]

"you are going to brazil" just got a whole new meaning lmao

[ogcipher]

On one hand, if you commit a crime you deserve to be punished, on the other, I think a lot of people can agree that seeing a massive corporation run around like a chicken without a head because of their own incompetence is quite cathartic.

[Gronmin]

Would have been good to mention that Riot didn't even infer to anyone that their information might have been stolen until about a year after those forum posts which were already a year after the hack had happened and they should have let everyone know

[RisingRevengeance]

Not saying he deserves to be locked up but it is wild that he got away with it by using aspergers as an excuse. I mean I have that/high functioning and I doubt I could use it as a legal defense.

[FanaticalRanger]

He got out of going to jail because of a mental illness is utter bs, he knew what he was doing as he was parading it around and taunting people

[ss-wryg]

"Lost our goodwill in over playerbase"
-That was gone way before.

[dougray]

A Kira video is the best firework display this July 4th....

[eddielopez]

The phrase is “with great power comes great responsatillatrance.”

[ChitChat]

Friendly reminder that brute force attacks are still a thing. It's just done on captured hashes, offline, instead of the servers directly. Use a password manager and never reuse the same passwords.

[Kevin-rzvx]

I played a ton of LOL in season 1-3 and didnt hear about Jason. I decided to play some arams a few years later and my password didnt work. I went through the Riot password recovery which didnt work, so I had to contact support to try and convince them it was my account. Things like who was in my friends list, what was the last skin I purchased, etc.

When I got my account back I found that somebody was playing on it and had bought it from a hacker. The guy even messaged me asking for it back. I never understood how my account was compromised but now it makes complete sense. At least Riot support had the audacity to tell me about password security practices.

[regalgiant]

Multi billion company, one guy with ass burgers.

Fight.

[bipolarminddroppings]

Big respect for name checking, and linking to, old Gonzo himself, Ricardo Lewis, multiple time esports journalist of the year and lifetime achievement award winning journalist.

The man is a true legend on esports and deserves recognition, especially in LoL...

[pneumaofficial]

That much money in bitcoin back then is crazy

[crusadering]

8:10 bruteforcing wasnt a poor approach to steal riot accounts, if you wanted to get a mass amount of accounts, like some people did, riot never used to have a password lockout of any kind. (no clue if they do now) but you could run a bot to do it for you overnight, you basically just got a word list, which consisted of like 500 notepads full of dictionary words and names and some code

the code would basically execute those words with numbers on the end those could be like 123, 1, 1998 etc. etc. the other popular one i used would be username and numbers, a lot of people used to just use the username and some numbers or in some cases just the username as the password.

i mean hell, i still have some accounts from way back when i used to do this with the exact same password.



you would think companies have would care about security and all that but they dont, lots of websites still allow for bruteforcing, and you can steal a lot of personal information doing so, a great example that comes to mind are a lot of the facebook businesses that have their own webpage and store



i am also curious to know about Jasons involvement in the neopets hack, because if hes the one who sold the database to Joe he made absolute bank.

[cbrwx]

and now riot games hacks you by forcing you to install vanguard which is basically a rootkit, i rather have this hacker than riot tbh. Never playing lol again until vanguard is gone.

[CzechTheKillcam]

As a fan of Richard Lewis and his work, it was awesome to see the shoutout and recognition!