Electronic Arts had to postpone the finals of the Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS) tournament in North America after hackers hacked professional players during a tournament match. The participants of the tournament were given wallhack (the ability to see through walls) and aimbot (auto-aiming and no recoil or spread during shooting).
Last Monday, during a match between the DarkZero and Luminosity teams, in the game client of one of the DarkZero players, Genburten, the cheat tool TSM HALAL HOOK and started working, the interface of which could be seen on the screen. As a result, the affected player was able to see the positions of all other players in the game on the map and was forced to leave the match, leaving his team one player short.
Instead of canceling the results of this game, EA simply the Luminosity team the winner and moved on to the next match.
However, the hackers continued their attack, this time activating aimbot for a player from the TSM team with the nickname ImperialHal. ImperialHal remained on the server (deciding that he simply wouldn’t shoot) until the organizers intervened and stopped the match. After the game, he was banned for using cheating software. His teammate, Verhulst, also received a ban.
It is believed that the attack was carried out by hackers using the nicknames Destroyer2009 and R4ndom, whose nicks were visible in the chat window of Genburten at the time of the breach.
Shortly after the incident, the official Apex Legends Esports account on the X social network that the North American finals would be postponed until organizers secure the competition from external interference.
Later, a person claiming to be Destroyer2009 told the user X , who collects information about cheats in video games, that he used some RCE vulnerability to hack ALGS player clients. The alleged perpetrator did not specify whether the vulnerability was in the Apex Legends client itself, in the built-in Easy Anti-Cheat software, or in some other software.
Currently, there are many theories circulating online about how the ALGS hack could have been implemented, including: an RCE vulnerability in the Apex Legends client, a vulnerability in Easy Anti-Cheat, and even a pre-planned hack of players’ devices long before the matches began.
Due to the uproar, the developers of Easy Anti-Cheat were forced to on X. They write that they have conducted an investigation and are confident that there are no RCE vulnerabilities in their software.
The developers of Apex Legends have not made any statements yet, and it is still unclear whether the affected players were compromised earlier or were actually hacked during the matches. However, regardless of how the hack occurred, this is an unprecedented case, as players have never been hacked live before, and tournaments have never had to be stopped because of it.