An infamous hacker, advertising himself as 'Destroyer2009', managed to remotely execute cheats into two professional Apex Legends players' games, during a Live regional tournament final. This scandalous event provoked questions among the apex community, whether the game is safe to be played or not.
What happened during the Apex Legends Regional Finals?
Below is one of the two clips, that shows a player with the nickname "Genburten", who plays for DarkZero (DZ), suddenly got a pop-up prompt on screen with cheating options and immediate wallhacks activated, prompting his confused reaction, that was streamed live to his twitch audience.
The next clip you are about to see, is of the second player, "ImperialHAL", who plays for Team SoloMid (TSM), instead of a wallhack, out of nowhere got aimbot, resulting in an equally confused reaction.
Response by the organizers
The tournament organizers came out with a statement, notifying that the tournament has been postponed, following the compromised integrity of the competition, with more information to be revealed soon.
Due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised, we have made the decision to postpone the NA finals at this time.
— Apex Legends Esports (@PlayApexEsports) March 18, 2024
We will share more information soon.
Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC), the anti-cheat used by Apex Legends, stated that they've investigated the issue and assured the community that there was no Remote Command Execution (RCE) vulnerability exploited by the hacker.
We have investigated recent reports of a potential RCE issue within Easy Anti-Cheat. At this time - we are confident that there is no RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited. We will continue to work closely with our partners for any follow up support needed
— Easy Anti-Cheat (@TeddyEAC) March 18, 2024
As a result, ImperialHAL's account was banned (restricted access to), for an apparent investiagtion launched by EA/Respawn, as stated by the player himself later on.
Who is 'Destroyer2009'?
This individual is known by viewers of pro players' streams on twitch, as the "unbannable cheater, that has been tormenting professional players' ranked lobbies for a long time". He would crash the server (make the game for everybody freeze), on which the streamer was playing his ranked game on, forcing them to leave and as a result to lose ranked points (RP).
The way you rank-up in Apex, is by getting kills, and placing higher in the match. The last team standing gets the most points. Learn more about how Apex Legends ranked works on their official help page.
Below are some clips of the hacker infiltrating ranked games of Hal:
A coincidental reveal of the attacker?
ImperialHAL jumped on a call with Jason 'Thor' Hall, of Pirate Software, and discussed on how the hacker could have managed to perform the malicious actions on his computer.
In this hour-long conversation, they discussed what had happened, and they also examined a screenshot of an inbound connection detected by Malwarebytes on his computer. The screenshot revealed an IP address, seemingly owned by a third-party server, which could have been used to inject those cheats into his computer during the game.
The IP address, after being run through virustotal.com, was marked as malicious by 9 vendors.
The question still remains whether the hacker managed to execute the cheats through vulnerabilities within the game client itself or by utilizing other means to gain access to the players' systems.
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