Bot of Legends hackers’ hard drives wiped thanks to ‘malicious coding’

Users of the premium version of League of Legends hack Bot of Legends were in for a surprise when they opened the latest version earlier this week. When activated, it completely formatted the user’s hard drives, leaving thousands of disgruntled cheaters bombarding the forums for answers—after they reinstalled everything, that is.

The Bot of Legends creators blamed the problem on a rival hacker who injected malicious code into their software. However, several users are not convinced. They claim that the software contains a piece of code that formats the hard drive of anyone using a cracked version of the premium software, which is paid for via a subscription model. Some believe that a simple typo in the code caused the reformatting. Users even uploaded the piece of offending code they believed was responsible. The Bot of Legends creators, however, have denied that this was the case on their official forums.

Shortly after the formatting issue came to light, the Bot of Legends website went down for unknown reasons. That left affected users with no platform for discussion or finding answers. Once the site was back up and running, it didn’t take long for users to realize what had happened to their computers, however. Even worse, they were told that the malicious code also sent in-game names and regions to an external website, something that could potentially lead to them getting banned.

Riot’s initiatives to combat in-game hacking have been mostly ineffective. Occurrences such as this could, however, be more of a deterrent than anything the game’s developer can come up with. As one user complained “This is pathetic, my entire fucking uni work deleted because of some fuck up? You guys are delivering a service and one of the most used scripts get ‘compromised’ what a fucking joke. Shouldn’t there be implementations to prevent shit like this and protect your consumers? I am fucking pissed off.”

This isn’t the first issue with Bot of Legends. In November, a security leak caused 130,000 users who used the software between 2012 and 2014 to have their in-game name, region and IP address leaked into the public domain. At the time, the site owner, who is known only as “spudgy,” said: “For those who have worries about the future of the site and project, you need not worry. It’s business as usual and we will continue to provide the best service on the market available.”