Hackers Ruin Apex Legends Global Series - Players Targeted Mid-Game

The Apex Legends Global Series Regional Finals have been postponed by EA and Respawn after the competitive integrity and security of the tournament were compromised by an unprecedented hacking incident.
In Game 3, team DarkZero’s Genburten had their computer compromised, and a hacker remotely installed cheats mid-tournament, despite the event taking place on a private server.
While streaming his tournament run on Twitch, a UI popped up on Genburten’s screen, followed by a message that was sent to the lobby from his account, reading:
“Apex hacking global series by Destroyer2009 & R4ndom”
The hackers then took over Genburten’s aim, turned on wall hacks, and spammed in-game chat, all caught on stream. Genburten was understandably shocked and decided to leave the game to avoid ruining the match. Despite going down a player, his DarkZero teammates were able to still secure second place as a duo and were first place in the tournament going into Game 4.
While it appeared that Genburten quit fast enough to avoid impacting the game, FURIA ImMadness pointed out that during the small window that the account was taken over, one stray shot from the possessed body of Genburten killed E8 Zaptoh from across the map.
During Game 4, the hackers struck again. This time TSM’s ImperialHal was the target. As TSM was about to engage in a fight, ImperialHal noticed that something was off about his aim feeling snappier than usual despite using a high recoil gun. He immediately told his team that he had been hacked with an aimbot on. TSM took cover inside of a building with ImperialHal saying how he couldn’t shoot and his teammates told him to leave the game.
Shortly after, the private server was shutdown by tournament admins, leaving thousands of viewers confused as to what was happening. ImperialHal left the private session after the hacking incident and found that he could no longer startup matchmaking queue or enter any game mode for that matter. He didn’t have to speculate for long as he received an account ban notification while live on Twitch in front of thousands of viewers.
While no official statement has been made from the developers, it is speculated that ImperialHal’s ban was triggered after the hacks on his account were detected by the game’s anti-cheat system. Approximately 15 minutes after the server was shut down, the ALGS admins announced that the NA Finals would be postponed, with no concrete date set.
“Due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised, we have made the decision to postpone the NA Finals at this time. We will share more information soon.”
The Anti-Cheat Police Department posted a PSA stating that a remote code execution (RCE) exploit was used to inject cheats into the player’s machines. They had advised against playing any games protected by Easy-Anti Cheat or any EA titles given how this exploit could allow hackers to install ransomware software to lock up PCs.
However, the Easy Anti-Cheat Twitter account contradicted this statement, saying that, after an internal investigation, they found no evidence of an RCE exploit utilized by the hackers.
With suspicions mounting, Epic Games who bought Easy Anti-Cheat in 2018 issued a statement of their own to reassure players that there is no RCE vulnerability with EAC for the hackers to exploit. This has since led people to believe that the problem may be with the Source engine that Apex Legends uses.
As news of this is spreading the Apex Legends community and beyond are calling out to Respawn and EA with questions on how this has happened and for better security to protect their players.
With the developers have postponed the North American Finals in the wake of the competitive integrity of the game being compromised and how publicly it was broadcasted, what went down at the NA ALGS Regional Finals has gone down as one of the biggest hacking incidents in esports history.
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[@Akshonesports]

Respawn has released an announcement on the Apex Legends hacking situation stating that they "have deployed the first of a layered series of updates to protect the Apex Legends player community and create a secure experience" for their players.

[@felipenachmanowicz9393]

lol man, who would have thought that it would be normal to hear a pro player profusely announcing "I'm cheating!" in a tournament!?!?!?!

[@blackjesus476]

What's more insane is that they still managed to get top 2 in that game as a duo.

[@cupidok2768]

Y so desperate to cheat

[@pingpong5877]

​@@cupidok2768when money is on the line, you do what you gotta do to win.

[@MasterNox]

I feel bad for the players, I can only imagine how terrified they were as it happened.

[@TheOmegaRiddler]

As Thor said, if there wasn't any proof left in the chat, these two players would be fucked as there would be no way to prove they weren't cheating.

[@6lin9]

Can’t stand EA

[@Dartagnyan]

I know this comment is a bit late relative to the video's publish time especially on such a hot button topic but thank you for covering the talk pirate software had with hal, Thor from pirate software actually talked about the whole cheat debocle a lot earlier and they've covered a lot of the potential stuff and the sort of standard procedure that you're supposed to take when covering such a topic on their channel, can't recommend it more and I'm happy that you guys either from watching that video or from the pureness of your hearts decided to take follow the procedure and didn't essentially add more fuel to the fire, this is what is needed in such a volatile situation especially with all the animosity between the player base and respawn.

[@GoodMenstruationAttitude]

so they install a rootkit on every player's system, but then still can't detect hacks 🤣🤣🤣

[@amadhatter3280]

Not quite. The hacker planted a code weeks in advance into their machines (likely through another another software they downloaded before) & waited until the finals to trigger the Malware on their computers.

[@PlushPilla]

This video is a bit outdated since evidence was found that the hacker was hacking the server and not the players PC. The cheat UI was made ingame, wallhacks and aimbot being done by fetching the players coordinates that the client recived, and the zombie bots hacks that were happening before. (I don't play the game but someone told me that there was an event where the devs implemented the code that allowed the zombie bots to exist.) TLDR; Destroyer found a way to control the servers and everyone ate it. btw the bans were made not for the cheating but to freeze the state of the account. Remote access like the the way was portrayed is a federal crime, so the computer becomes the scene of it. Always help the devs by talking to them and explaning your circunstances before the ban. It's not always their or your fault.

[@exoqqen]

sources? interested in the topic

[@PlushPilla]

@@exoqqen cant link because yt doesn't like that. You can find it in Techlik's video about the news of that week

[@lukedanielgalon1596]

I think this has to be the most embarrassing thing i ever seen in Esports for sure and the fact it’s Happens to EA makes it even better

[@pccloud9657]

This happened march 17/18th depending on your time zone and not 13th. There also was an update by the dev team 15 hours before the release of this video.

[@yourlocalpieboy]

This is gonna get patch in a week while us titanfall 2 players are still waiting

[@resonancetrue]

well made video, thanks for the info

[@Akshonesports]

Glad it was helpful!

[@jonathanmvkhai]

Well... DDos attack in LCK is inconvenient too.

[@fredriddles1763]

Hackers got so sick of being called losers that they decided to pass their curse on to real players.

[@syafranmuflih7139]

I hope there is a follow up video for this scandal. This is huge news.

[@dragogaming9192]

All the pros in the lobby need to check there pc in case the no life hacker put some shit in their pc

[@jccura1487]

Wth!

[@fhjunior6183]

Thanks for the vid

[@lemmyboy4107]

idk ma this behavior would be an insane security risk. And as much as ea is a bad company i dont think the devs are this bad at what they are doing. Tbh enabling this remote access is absolutly not needed for any part of the game, so imo its very likley the players fucked up

[@amadhatter3280]

From what the expects have said this "Destroyer2009" has access to a Dev account & is able to control the lobby like a Dev would (if you want to see a dev account in actions check out Camomo_10 , a game dev for Rust that goes around fucking with cheaters in funny ways). He can't give cheats from the Dev client so in his (the expect's) opinion both Genburton & Hal downloaded something that gave this guy access to their computers, this malware was likely on their systems for weeks (or months) so he could trigger it at the worse time.

[@goldsocks9999]

It's a Remote CODE execution

[@Mexican00b]

Obviously the anti cheat will say its not an RCE... that would make any kernel anti cheat obsolete right there and then xd

[@BooleanDev]

2:55 RCE stands for Remote Code Execution, not Control

[@scopiieee9271]

are the OW vids gonna make a comeback soon?

[@PokeMaster22222]

In my mind, the actual pro players should never be themselves punished for something that was provably *not their fault* - sure, their accounts should be quarantined for a while just in case, but permanently banned? No way. Also, this proves that kernel-level anti-cheat can be circumvented and bypassed; that it doesn't catch everything. With that proven, kernel-level anti-cheats should only activate when a multiplayer game is launched, should immediately terminate when the game process is terminated, and be completely uninstalled when the game is uninstalled. Plus, the user should be made aware of the kernel-level anti-cheat, and asked to consent to its installation alongside the game. Kernel-level programs like these should NEVER be installed without the user's knowledge or consent, should NEVER remain running without an active instance of the associated game process, and should NEVER interfere with other computer functions or usage.

[@5lammer]

100% a problem with the users machine and has nothing to do with the game.

[@game-sheriff]

🫠🫠🫠🫠🫠

[@Raxul]

It's really easy to blame developers, but I'm sure if they weren't as overworked/understaffed or rushed, like they WILL be given they work for EA, it would've been way hardir to pull this off. This has more got to do with companies not caring enough about this topic. Hence why it's outsourced to a 3rd party, on a kernel level anti cheat that hasn't worked properly for a while.

[@keselekbakiak]

So if they are overworked and understaffed, we should tolerate everything?

[@aaartem]

no, but you shouldnt be blowing shit out of proportion and endlessly shitting on respawn@@keselekbakiak

[@Sammysapphira]

Everyone is "overworked". It's not an excuse.

[@samsr2887]

it's remote code execution not remote control execution

[@aidenfrost10]

lmao

[@ANDREGOLDENEYE]

I miss your old style videos, guys...

[@belojah2]

I do too. Maybe they're struggling to find gaming communities to highlight?

[@ANDREGOLDENEYE]

@@belojah2 maybe some struggling in finances, I thought so sometimes

[@Akshonesports]

We have more long form videos in production that you can look forward too soon!

[@ANDREGOLDENEYE]

Great news! Thanks for the answer! ​@@Akshonesports

[@Quoxz]

Funniest shit I've seen in a while. Lol

[@mehedieval]

akshon make more overwatch microplays please

[@1mBilly]

Oh no, we are so sorry about this situation. Here's a $700 universal heirloom 🤗 -probably Ea

[@dustiermex2589]

Ruined wouldn't be the world I would say.

[@ZeludeRose]

respawn moment

[@troyheymanwhatsup2996]

Algorithm engagement comment

[@Saltience]

Bot response

[@johndriscoll213]

Kernel level anticheat delivers again! What a nice, convenient backdoor for an attacker to do whatever they want. Absolutely shameful. Maybe a couple more incidents like this will make developers realize how ridiculous these programs are.

[@zs9652]

They really should just start checking stats on players and flagging or banning suspicious ones. If your game needs a lot of mechanical skill, than checking to see if certain players are way above normal human abilities should be easy. The soft cheaters would be harder. But if your stat referee is good enough, soft cheaters would be barely distinguishable from non cheating players.

[@Bulju]

I love how you included the clip of Thor telling the players they might've been the ones who downloaded a trojan somewhere and immediately go on to place all the blame on the developers because "hurr durr EA bad updoots to the left"

[@pingu2992]

I mean are you gonna say EA aren't bad? lmfao What are the chances of two pro Apex players getting hacked at the same time during a major tournament because they both just happened to download the same trojan from the same guy off the internet somewhere? From what I've heard this isn't the first major Source RCE vulnerability over the years either. I'm sure the guy was just throwing possibilities into the ring because as he said, we don't know for sure why. But in my opinion it's overwhelmingly likely that it's a vulnerability in the game or the EA client somewhere.

[@zaneity8672]

Hmm I wonder what he downloaded. I wonder Hmmmm

[@FakeGoose]

small correction at 32 seconds. the message was not sent to the lobby, but to his teammates.

[@jjmah7]

Wait, people still play this game?!?

[@yuxin9996]

well the game sucks.

[@saito853]

Imagine blaming the developers when it's most likely that the players got their pc compromised instead lmao, the Internet is wild

[@subtlewhatssubtle]

I would normally agree except that there's tweets of multiple matches being affected by these hackers. In different ways yes but affected nonetheless. I'll accept one instance as player fault, but more than that and you have to start asking questions. As the old saying goes, once is a fluke, twice is coincidence, and three times is hostile action.

[@Dartagnyan]

​@@subtlewhatssubtleif you check out pirate softwares video on the topic it's more of a mix of both. The pop up stuff is likely to be a personal thing as in the end of the video they explained so and the whole bots in public lobbies are more of a server exploit or a compromised employee machine

[@ChannelName3230]

Good i gate apex

[@gravityvertigo13579]

Imagine being scummy enough to do something like this and ruin so many people's fun (and fuck with people's livelihoods too!)

[@Masterho310]

This is why you shouldn’t purchase EA products ever …