Apex Legends hacker said he hacked tournament games ‘for fun’

20.03.2024 - 17:37 / techcrunch.com

On Sunday, the world of video games was shaken by a hacking and cheating scandal.

During a competitive esports tournament of Apex Legends, a free-to-play shooter video game played by hundreds of thousands of players daily, hackers appeared to insert cheats into the games of two well-known streamers — effectively hacking the players midgame.

“Wait, what the fuck? I’m getting hacked, I’m getting hacked bro, I’m getting hacked,” said one of the players allegedly compromised during a livestream of the gameplay.

The incidents forced the organizers of the Apex Legends Global Series tournament, which has a $5 million total prize pool, to postpone the event indefinitely “due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised.”

As the midgame hacks were underway, the game’s chatbot displayed messages on-screen that appeared to come from the hackers: “Apex hacking global series, by Destroyer2009 &R4andom,” the messages read.

In an interview with TechCrunch, the hacker Destroyer2009 took credit for the hacks, saying that he did it “just for fun,” and with the goal of forcing the Apex Legends’ developers to fix the vulnerability he exploited.

The hacks sent the Apex Legends community into a frenzy, with countless streamers reacting to the incidents, and some players suggesting Apex Legends is not safe to play, because every player could be at risk of getting hacked not only in-game, but potentially having their computers hacked, too.

Destroyer2009 declined to provide details of how he allegedly pulled off hacking the two players midgame, or what specific vulnerabilities he exploited.

“I really don’t want to go into the details until everything is fully patched and everything goes back to normal,” the hacker said. The only thing Destroyer2009 said regarding the technique he used was that the vulnerability “has nothing to do with the server and I’ve never touched anything outside of the Apex process,” and that he did not hack the two players’ computers directly.

The hacks “never went outside of the game,” he said.

Destroyer2009 said he did not report the vulnerability to Respawn, the video game developer that makes Apex Legends, because neither the company nor the game’s publisher, Electronic Arts, offer a bug bounty program that financially rewards hackers and researchers for privately reporting security flaws.

“They know how to patch it without anyone reporting it to them,” he said.

Talking about the hacks he did during the tournament, Destroyer2009 said that he “went viral, but 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