If you live in the Philippines and you play League of Legends, you may want to run your antivirus program right away.
A player shared their findings on the game’s Reddit community about a cryptocurrency mining program called Coinhive that is loaded into Garena’s game client. There has been a debate about the legality of this action by Garena, as it uses their customers’ machines to mine for currency. However, it is unlikely that Garena itself installed the program.
Coinhive is a low-impact Javascript-based program that can easily be integrated into any website design. When someone visits the website or downloads the Philippines Garena League client, they unknowingly give the program access to their machine.
Instead of Garena exploiting their customers’ machines for mining cryptocurrency, it is more likely that someone gained unauthorized access to the client’s back-end and loaded the program themselves. It is also possible that this issue is not widespread and only a few players were targeted.
If the entire Philippines playerbase has been affected by this program, it is a serious matter and we hope that Garena will take necessary steps to fix it. Neither Garena nor Riot Games have commented on the issue yet.