Recently, DDoS attacks targeting T1 and the LCK tournament have become a hot topic in the League of Legends community. Even when T1 found ways to avoid these attacks, their teammates in ranked mode became the targets. This significantly affected T1’s practice, livestreaming, and ultimately their performance.
For many, only “hackers” with deep technological knowledge could execute such attacks. However, the League of Legends community recently discovered an unexpectedly simple way to disconnect other players from League of Legends similarly to DDoS attacks. The most unbelievable part is that to execute this, players only need to use a simple string of characters.
Specifically, a Twitter user (also known as X) named 4T7VN recently found that when chatting the string of characters “૮ – ﻌ • ა”, the player themselves would disconnect. What’s more, after reconnecting and continuing to type the same string, most players in the match would also be disconnected. Notably, the opponents would stand still for the player’s teammates to take them down without any resistance.
Even more surprisingly, if a player sends this string to a friend in the match, that person also disconnects. Accordingly, the aforementioned Twitter user sent this string to his streamer friends like Reptile or Alois. The result was that these guys disconnected live on stream.
It can be said that with this vulnerability, players are like “omnipotent beings” in League of Legends. Players can completely control whether their opponents or teammates can play League of Legends or not. Furthermore, if they want to “prank” friends in the match, players can easily make them disconnect from the game without facing any resistance. Moreover, executing this attack is incredibly easy as it only requires sending a message to the target.
It’s very likely that the above string causes some sort of error in the game’s code when it appears in League of Legends, leading to the disconnection issue. We hope that Riot Games will soon find a way to fix this bug as soon as possible to ensure players’ experience.