Over the weekend, Apex Legends and Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS) fans were looking forward to what they thought would be an exciting tournament with the ALGS North American finals.
It was exciting alright, but not for the reasons you’d expect. The excitement came from a hacker known as Destroyer2009 was able to hack two pro players mid-game, enabling cheats like aimbot and wall-hacks to players ImperialHal and Genburten.
In the days that followed we’ve seen statements from Easy Anti-Cheat and Respawn, with the former saying it wasn’t a vulnerability on their end and the latter saying they’ve released security updates and are investigating the source of the hack.
On Wednesday, the hacker came forward to claim responsibility for the hack in an interview with TechCrunch, saying they did it “just for fun.”
Destroyer2009 says that the hack wasn’t done with any ill intent, and mostly as a message to Respawn and EA to fix the vulnerability he exploited.
“Not many people would have used an exploit like that in an absolutely innocent way for players. Just imagine if it wasn’t a joke and we didn’t put any memes in the cheat, I’m pretty sure you can ruin someone’s career if they had a cheat pop up on a tournament.”
Destroyer2009 also seemingly went this route because neither Respawn or EA have a bug bounty program, where they could’ve been financially compensated for reporting the bug to them privately.
As far as why Destroyer2009 targeted ImperialHal and Genburten, they claim those were the targets because “they’re just nice guys.”
For those concerned that the vulnerability came from outside Apex Legends, Destroyer2009 claims that there’s nothing to worry about, saying that his hack “has nothing to do with the server and I’ve never touched anything outside the Apex process.” According to Destroyer2009, the hacks “never went outside the game.”
Destroyer2009 also claims that they didn’t hack the two pro players PC’s directly. Interestingly though, game developer and hacking and security expert Thor Hall doesn’t believe that Destroyer2009 accessing ImperialHal and Genburten’s PC’s can be ruled out.
We’re still waiting to hear from Respawn what happened, which should hopefully clear up the remaining confusion around how the hack happened, and if players can safely jump back on Apex Legends.
Source – [TechCrunch, PirateSoftware]