Apex Legends tournament hacker says he did it "for fun"

eurogamer.net:

The hacker who disrupted the North American Apex Legends Global Series finals has said he did it «just for fun».

The Apex Legends esport finals took place earlier this week, during which two players were hacked, and given cheat-based abililties. EA and Respawn abandoned the finals, with the Apex esports team stating the «competitive integrity» of the series had been «compromised».

It's believed that Destroyer2009, a hacker previously seen in Apex Legends, was behind the security breach. In a new interview with TechCrunch, Destroyer2009 said the hacks were his work, which he did «just for fun».

Destroyer2009 said the hack was intended to show the vulnerabilities present in Apex Legends with good intentions — in order to highlight the issue to a large audience. «Not many people would have used an exploit like that in an absolutely innocent way for players,» he said. He claimed he didn't report the vulnerability to Respawn and EA because they don't offer rewards to third parties who find security flaws.

Destroyer2009 declined to give details on how he executed the hacks, but claimed it had «nothing to do with the server», and he «never touched anything outside of the Apex process». He also claimed he didn't hack either of the players' computers. «I really don't want to go into the details until everything is fully patched and everything goes back to normal,» he said.

Easy Anti-Cheat came under scrutiny following the Apex finals hack. After suggestions the hack was carried out through a vulnerability in Easy Anti-Cheat, the company made its first post on X in five years to state it was «confident that there is no [remote code execution] vulnerability within EAC».

Yesterday, Respawn confirmed the hacks occurred during the tournament and that the studio had deployed the «first of a layered series of updates» to increase player security.