Apex Legends Tournament Hacker Says “It was just for fun”

Players participating in the Apex Legends Global Series tournament organized by the game developers Respawn Entertainment reported being hacked in real time. Now, the hacker has come forward and said he did it just for fun.

Apex Legends is a free-to-play shooter that has amassed a large following, and tournaments are often organized worldwide. Like with any other online game, cheaters are always a problem. Developers frequently play whack-a-mole with cheaters as they often devise new ways of compromising online matches.

On the other hand, hackers usually have other interests, like money for example. However, the gaming community is highly competitive and sometimes players go to great lengths to cause problems for adversaries, even if that breaches ethical boundaries.

During a live tournament, a hacker named Destroyer2009, somehow managed to deploy various cheating tools for other players. All the victims noticed something was wrong and either quit the match or stopped playing altogether out of fear of getting banned.

The community assumed it must have something to do with the Easy Anti Cheat solution used by the game or with Apex Legends itself. Soon after the incident, the Easy Anti Cheat devs confirmed on Twitter that there was no vulnerability in their software.

This left Apex Legends as the possible attack vector. Respawn didn’t confirm it was something on their end only that they took some measures.

“On Sunday, a few professional Apex Legends player accounts were hacked during an ALGS event,” said the company on Twitter. “Game and player security are our highest priorities, which is why we paused the competition to address the issue immediately. Our teams have deployed the first of a layered series of updates to protect the Apex Legends player community and create a secure experience for everyone.”

The hacker confessed in a Techcrunch interview that he only did it for fun. He refused to say how exactly he pulled it off, but he did say he “never went outside of the game.” In fact, he didn’t touch the server or the players’ computers.

“I really don’t want to go into the details until everything is fully patched and everything goes back to normal,” the hacker added.