There is a trending topic happening now on subreddit /r/leagueoflegends/, titled PSA: League of Legends Philippines client is using your PC as a bitcoin miner posted by lestargonzaga. The controversy is something to do with the League of Legends Philippines Client which allegedly had a built-in Bitcoin miner on its Garena client program, this is after the reddit user booted his laptop and suddenly the anti-virus Malwarebytes flagged the LOL Client as Riskware, it detect a bitcoin miner that points to coinhive.com which is known for mining a cryptocurrency called monero.
Based on the summary reports, the miner is added on the LeagueClientUX.exe and points to IP address 128.42.4.118 (coinhive.com domain).
Meanwhile, the comments on the thread is flooded with the legality of the built-in bitcoin miner on their program and how is it legal to use for its users. Reddit user Lenticious says “So many people wondering if it is really legal and here I am looking for the prequel memes.”. If we based the legality out of the European countries that currently have the GDPR, it is legal for companies to have a cryptocurrency miner on their product as there are no currently law preventing companies in using this kind of monetization. However, this may degrade computer lifespan and could lead to system crash or data corruption in which it can be use to file a lawsuit.
A comment from Lenticious also confirms it’s just not the Philippine LOL client has this issue, but other people in other countries as well “There has already been several posts about it in the past. It’s not just Philippines, it’s everyone who uses the Garena+ client.”.
So far, Riot or Garena hasn’t made any comment on the issue.
Updates: League of Legends Philippines made a comment today on their Facebook Page.
On July 9, 2:16 PM GMT+8, there was an unauthorized modification of the League of Legends PH client lobby where a certain javascript code was inserted. This code performs blockchain mining on affected computers, which consumes CPU resources from these computers. Apart from increased CPU usage, extensive analysis from our security engineers has determined that there is no other impact on affected computers. At July 11, 4:15 AM GMT+8, our security engineers have removed this javascript code and ensure that all users, including those who were previously affected, will no longer encounter this issue.
We treat security matters with utmost priority and sincerely apologize for this incident, and for the inconvenience you have experienced.
Should you have any questions or concerns you email us at account@garena.com