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During the Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS) regional finals for North America, two players were mysteriously granted access to cheats in the middle of their matches. The players impacted were DarkZero's Genburten and TSM's ImperialHal.
Genburten was the first to experience having his game apparently hacked and cheats enabled. During the match, you can see his character stop moving and then a menu popped up on his screen. At the exact same time, chat messages popped up within Genburten's Apex match that appeared to come from him, saying "Apex hacking global series by Destroyer2009 & R4ndom." Destroyer2009 is someone that made a name for themselves within the Apex community for pulling off similar attacks on players in non-professional matches, repeatedly using in-game cheats, and giving some players literally hundreds of free Apex Packs (loot boxes).
Pro player gets client hacked mid ALGS tournament
byu/Bombingit inapexlegends
A short time after Genburten was granted wallhacks, ImperialHal was granted an aimbot during his regional final match. ImperialHal immediately noticed something was wrong when after firing at one target, his bullets immediately snapped to hitting another, unseen target. ImperialHal kept exclaiming, "I have aimbot!" The server where ImperialHal was playing on shut down a short time after this incident took place.
What isn't clear right now is just how these attacks were carried out. Some are claiming that there is a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability either involving Apex Legends itself or Easy Anti-Cheat. Others with some knowledge of server security are saying that the accused hacker, Destroyer2009, possibly managed to gain access to Apex's own server tools and used webhooks to enable the cheats on the game clients for Genburten and ImperialHal. There is also the very real possibility that both Genburten and ImperialHal both had cheats on their system. Cheats that came with their own backdoor access allowing the cheat maker to "expose" these two players during a live event.
Without any sort of public facing statement from Respawn, Electronic Arts, Easy Anti-Cheat, or anybody with direct knowledge of the inner security workings of Apex Legends, it is simply too early to definitively say just how this could happen. A full blown RCE vulnerability within Apex Legends or Easy Anti-Cheat would probably be the absolute worst case scenario here.
Presently, the North American regional finals for ALGS have been postponed until further notice.
