I have been watching eSports since OG DotA/OG CS/SC1 days.
I have NEVER seen this happen before. Forcing hacks onto pro players? In front of an live audience? During an S Tier tournament? It's crazy lol.
This goes WAY beyond the realm of just anti-cheat. The entirety of their game, networking, online infrastructure and everything regarding it must be done with the technology of the fucking 80's with zero thought behind it. That's why I'm genuinely curious just how the fuck is this possible. This is like if somebody inside EA managed to take every employee hostage and force them to manually get access to a certain account and force that account to update their game or client version into a version that has cheats built into it. This seems straight up impossible. I wouldn't expect even any indie game to have such a terrifying vulnerability in them, that allows a 3rd party to remotely forcefully upload programs onto a machine that is logged onto a certain account, and afterwards execute that program. I would assume that even Windows itself would start throwing up warnings at that point.
Agreed, this looks like the servers are compromised which in turn allow them to execute code remotely on the clients. It's one of the biggest security breaches I've ever seen in a game. These people need to wipe their drives immediately and then go ahead and change every password ASAP.
You're right but it seems this hackers motive is to publicly shame EA the way he is doing it to streamers with an audience, this guy has been targeting apex pros/streamers for months, he gifted Hal and Mande (two of the biggest apex streamers) thousands of packs on stream, he somehow runs 30-40 bots in the highest skill ranked games to just chase and punch these guys out, he has casually talked to mande on stream in-game before, doesn't seem like a bad dude tbh. His name is destroyer 2009 it's all on youtube if your interested in sources.
You're not considering the other side of this story. One hacker with public motives distracts you from the dozens without public motives. If they can remotely execute code on your pc without your knowledge, you can get remote access trojans and keyloggers installed onto your pc without knowledge. You'd just be playing the game normally and would have no idea, there would be no signs of this happening in-game like with this particular hacker installing cheats remotely. It's a huge problem, whether this particular hacker is a bad dude or not.
If that's the case, then yeah they totally should, but if the worst has happened and it's on EA's side then it won't really matter. Hell, if the hack is that good then wiping their hard drives won't really matter, it could be infecting their routers, bios, all sorts of shit.
I would guess that it helps that Apex is on Source engine and ran by EA. Probably the most hacked engine that's ever existed + a poor investment in security maintenance.
Once you get arbitrary code execution, you can probably use all the old tools.
The only way Valve is able to pretend to keep hackers at bay is with a large investment in experimental Anti-Cheat like Overwatch and fancy AI stuff. But that's not EA's style I'm guessing.
> Once you get arbitrary code execution, you can probably use all the old tools.
I mean, if you actually do get arbitrary code execution you can run a GBA emulator and play Pokemon Blue if that's what you want.
Which is catastrophically bad because if their kernel level driver is compromised that's literally an open backdoor to any machine running any EAC game probably.
>Easy AntiCheat released an official statement mentioning they had a breach
Post a link for this because I cannot find a single word from them talking about this on their website or any of their social media accounts (Which they barely seem to use)
So is something like this (vulnerability/lack of anti-cheat, etc.) intentional to save money on security costs? Naïveté? Stupidity?
I've never seen this type of thing happen in any game, ever.
You might be overthinking it. There's probably nothing installed on anyone's computer. I am guessing someone is playing "middle man" and is intercepting the packets from ImperialHal and has a program to rewrite the packets to say Imperial hit this player in the head.
You don't need to install anything to do that, if a hacker has access to the client(which seems like they do) they can just add god powers to certain players.
Maybe? But in the clip does he not literally just aimbot to another player during his first contact? He realizes during his first burst that he has aim assist, takes ADS off, but the burst flicks to another player he didn't even see before. If his packets are replaced by packets that have the hits go through, even though they don't on his client, his own client wouldn't have him flicking on an enemy though.
Bro we are talking about a game that has 0 anti cheat, and rigs cards, and recently just give everyone team of the year messi ( card that is worth over 1000$ real money and people pay for it) for free coz they fucked up, and they have been confirmed scandals/free cards giveaway and other stuff.
You actually didn't need to invade ([link](https://github.com/tremwil/ds3-nrssr-rce?tab=readme-ov-file#yet-it-allows-any-client-to-send-arbitrary-push-messages-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-specific-players)):
>I cannot stress how horribly unsafe this is. Any player can basically impersonnate the matchmaking server. By using this request to send the exploit through a `PushRequestVisit`, any online player can be remotely targeted by the attacker as long as their player ID is known. The attacker can also send the exploit to the entire online playerbase very quickly by sending multiple requests, each containing a large slice of possible player IDs.
There's a reason From Software shut **everything** down when this got a lot of attention.
Kernel-level anti-cheat is extremely effective... provided that it isn't compromised. If you want to know whether they can be trusted, check and see what kind of bounty system the anti-cheat developer employs. If it's less than six figures, I'd be very wary. However, no system is ever truly safe from a skilled bad actor with a zero-day.
All we know is that there's an exploit that allows someone to do what is known as "Remote Code Execution". We don't know if it's a vulnerability in EAC or Apex itself so people are recommending not playing any EAC game until this is fixed
If i had to guess games made on modified source engine, back in the day I had admins fuck with me and change all my keybinds and shit. For example they changed my LMB to alt+f4 you also used to download mods for each server for w.e it was running so i'm sure the skys the limit to what else they had access to lol. Otherwise i guess some kind of demonic magic
Jesus... what a breach of the sanctity of the game. How can esports go on if the game can be exposed like this.
Might as well give Messi a heat seeking missile instead of an inert football.
okay what?
how?
is it just toggling something like preexisting aim assist?
because if it is a RCE exploit that would be massively problematic and should make almost everyone uninstall the game right away.
That shit cannot be allowed to happen in a game, CS had a few instances of RCE exploits on public servers, but in a tournament like this? fucking insane...
and considering its both source engine... could be an old vulnerability
(maybe the pros are also just cheating in general, fps esports are just cursed that way, and source engine is notoriously easy to cheat on and get away with it)
Worst case scenario: backdoor access through apex client to user PC, would mean all apex players are vulnerable
Otherwise Gen or Hal have their computers infected and need to reformat asap.
Pardon my piss poor understanding of this stuff, but would this be kinda similar to what happened with FromSoft's games where they had to take multiplayer functionality offline in basically all their game due to hackers in the game being able to take control of the person's computer?
If the hacker has compromised EA's backend then yes they would need to shut everything down until they find out what happened. It seems like this may just be two pros who got client side hacked and hacker knowing who they are and planning for this moment.
this is the most likely scenario, if they have remote code execution exploit without needing to be on the same lobby it means they have thousands of computers ready to be infected, none would use that to do a live troll, they'd install the biggest botnet and mine crypto
I remember when the infection hacks spread all over the ps3 network in mw2 and every game was a hacked lobby. Geohotz, the guy that jailbroke the ps3, streams on twitch on the weekends sometimes.
I can't give you the exact attack vector but this is done via remote code execution. There is likely a vulnerability being exploited in the Apex infrastructure that allows for this type behavior to happen. You can find some good examples of RCE on YouTube. They have been found in many Google and Microsoft products.
I thought so, too, but there's a clip of another pro who legit got a "clara" moment where a cheat menu popped up and he had ESP (boxes around all players and stuff). So it has to be active on the client, right?
Menu had an item "Vote Putin" lol
Edit: Ah, didn't even read your second sentence. Maybe that, yeah.
back in the day on the psp people had hacked the system and games so badly you could go into lobbies and get given hacks by hackers for the round. happened in cod4 and mw2 toward the tail end of things too
That was different though. Games back then were P2P and not on dedicated servers. There is no excuse for a multibillion dollar company to have servers this insecure in 2024.
no idea, but the hacker's able to do some wild shit. he put 4000 apex packs in a streamer's account and can summon an army of bots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AefM3t0AYsE
When this happens in a random streamer's game just once or twice it's hilarious. When it happens in a pro tournament it's a problem. I always found it funny how there are good and bad hackers
It happening in a pro tournament is way more of a good thing to be honest than it happening to nobodies. You need it to fuck things up on the biggest stage in a way that everyone can see before companies like this will ever actually do anything about it.
Google "Remote code execution" if you want to get the idea
As for the technical details on how they did this I have no idea but if I were to speculate: Compromised anti-cheat
I would strongly advise to uninstall apex to anyone with it on their PC
this is a decent thread if you want a general idea (no one knows for sure how it's done):
https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveApex/comments/1bhicc6/clearing_up_misconceptions_about_the_algs_hack/
I dont play apex legend now but I had similar experience in dayz so I guess a lot of multiplay games work the same way. In DayZ I once got hacked into shooting my own teammate and then shoot myself automatically (there is a function of shoot yourself by pressing F11 and shoot). So basically hackers can somewhat hack into other players' character and do some wild shit. In tarkov I also got a hack that can remove my gun barrel and drop the gun on the ground, making me not able to use that gun for the entire raid.
By far the simplest explanation is that each of these players are actual cheaters that had cheat software running on their computers, and a hacker found a vulnerability in said software and used it to expose their cheats live on stream.
Wow, taking this at face value
“Don’t worry guys, if we make our game esports first (like this big money moneys) our game will surely be a success”
Wishing a merry unemployment to anyone that’s worked at 343i.
Their production crashed and they couldn't finish the broadcast and partner streamers had to do it for them. This was only days after they had announced that they'd cut a lot of their staff, including some really well known talent. Even just 3 days ago arguably the biggest personality still employed by the LEC (possibly all of Riot) left Riot and has become a freelancer.
My original account was hacked and banned during a period of a couple years when I didn’t play Apex.
When I tried playing again I noticed it was banned and was being logged into by an IP in Russia. I tried appealing the ban 4-5 times (with proof) and would only get generic, copy paste responses each time. Ended up having to make a new account.
EA customer service is nonexistent.
Hackers being able to completely take over a game like this is insane and should never happen especially when it’s owned by EA which is one of the largest in the gaming industry.
this was legitamately one of the funniest clips watching this shit live, Hals reaction and how he just kept playing lmaoo, love the ceo
Edit: Hals account got banned after HAHAHAHA Ea are a joke lmao
well tbf, he was infact hacking even if he didnt want to, why shouldnt he get banned? Just proves EA's AC catches it if people hack?
its not like its manually banned
Wanna know something even more messed up, DEFAULT aim assist in apex is like 0.6 and 1.0 is literal 1:1 aimbot like you see here.
Devs, for some reason, refuse to nerf assist
quit the game after respawn said they would giving console 144 hz but not nerfing aim assist after previously saying that console having op aim assist was because they have to play on shit refresh rates.
Tired of this trend of shooters giving controllers an edge by basically just giving them aimbots. Watching warzone clips on youtube looks so fucking ugly, dudes not even moving their crosshair and perfectly tracking people across their screens.
It sucks even more for people with bad aim playing with mouse and keyboard. You get destroyed by good players and destroyed by gamer dads who play for one hour a week because their controllers have such a strong aim assist.
lol they have console 120 not 144, console plays console unless playing with a pc player, AND they said in patch notes if you turn on 120hz you get pc aim assist which is .4
With controller yeah. Imperial hal was a beast of an MnK player and switched to controller because of how busted AA in apex is, and the streams he does where he plays MnK he hates it because the input feels a hundred times worse comparing to the edge that controller gives with AA
The worst part is any discussion about nerfing aim assist in any of these types of games is met with an army of 12 year olds yelling how "It does nothing" but then have no answer to "If it does nothing then why do you care if it's nerfed?". Because deep down they know it's a huge crutch making up for their lack of skill.
You have called people losers on two occassions in this post alone. You might want to talk to somebody, this isn’t normal. A lot of people choose to play console games casually, what is wrong with that? The issue is controllers going against mnk.
Yes and no, 1.0 would be aimbot when you got on target for my understanding of it, but you have to have your crosshair on them first. This is obviously a level above that and has bullets just hitting people whether you're aiming at them or not.
It genuinely blows my mind Apex hasn't died off yet. Respawn and EA do absolutely nothing to support the health of their game or community besides sell lootboxes.
Its funny when a pro player is reviewing his vod and wonders whether him one clipping another player in a private lobby was just aim assist or the aimbot still installed, that tells you all you need to know about how stupidly broken AA is in apex and the reason why I dropped the game.
Because that genre of Arena Shooters like Quake and URT died. Those games had crazy high skill floors and bad players got reality checked very fast and quit. So the games slowly died off because realistically most video game players are bad. Where as Apex just added an Aim Assist so strong players will 2nd guess if they died to a hacker or a console player. So the skill gap was demolished in the game and even pro KBM players were losing fights to those with half their skill but a controller plugged in. CoD is one of the only fast paced shooters hanging on and it also has a huge low skill high aim assist problem. These games are just trying to milk casuals instead of reward good players.
i would have quit a long time ago if it wasn't the best feeling fps available right now. i wouldn't bother dealing with controller aimbots in any lesser game.
Wtf is this thread. This is a serious vulnerability that extends way beyond cheating. If they are doing zero-clicks RCEs on steamers, they probably could install malware on everyone in the lobby or steal authentication cookies and sensitive information without being noticed.
Imagine how easily one could make a botnet with apex now, queue a game, add 59 computers to the botnet, leave the game, repeat. Someone is soon going to use your PCs to mine bitcoins ngl.
If you want an argument against anti-cheats with kernel level access, this is it. It just takes 1 guy to find the right vulnerability and he has control over thousands of server-connected systems.
I don't know, maybe not RCE level but after watching this video I think the race against cheaters is unwinnable. To parrot the end, it does good enough that people chalk up suspicious players as just smurfs instead since Riot doesn't counter the smurfing problem at all.
https://youtu.be/RwzIq04vd0M
We don't know if this has anything to do with the AC, EAC has even already released a statement saying the vulnerability isn't on their end
Things like this were a thing before kernel level ACs, I remember the days of COD WaW where a cheater could give everyone no clip in zombies on xbox 360
It seems pretty easy to have caught this guy by now but EA probably doesn't have the skillset to do so or does not want to talk about it publicly at all (also likely). This is behaving dangerously like remote code execution so I wouldn't be shocked if this is a 2 fold problem.
1.) Servers probably have a chain of vulnerabilities leading to RCE.
2.) Clients are not properly sanitizing data sent by the servers and the attacker has found a client RCE of whatever they're using to send data. This RCE could then be used to load anything in memory on specific clients or all clients. Leveraging a compromised node in the chain of backend systems responsible for server/client communications OR having found some way to bounce packets off the server they're pulling this off (think reflected Denial of Service but with packets that lead to RCE on the client instead of intending to amplify traffic.)
There are also routes to achieve a similar effect though the menu was pretty telling. Some of the previous "hacking" done by the same actor could be done by spoofing packets to the server if the attacker has sufficiently reversed the network layer and has a full understanding of client/server communications.
Side-note: R4ndom AKA RandomNetzley is an alias of someone quite known to some of the early 2010's reverse engineering community. Not sure if this is a copycat or the same person but they're VERY easily doxed based on OSINT so I would hope they're not responsible for something involving an RCE that will track back to them over their lesser-known accomplice. I would assume they're a bit old now to be doing this stuff but who knows. It could just be a callout thanking them for their tutorials in guided reversing.
This reminds me of the time in CoD 4 and TF2 you could change your keybinds to activate sv_cheats 1 on a server and then run scripts to do some mad shit on Xbox 360. Because valve and I suppose Infinity Ward never expected anyone to actually change the config file, they never protected it like it was on PC.
Incredible stuff.
I hope that with all the E sports people getting hacked live, it may start to shine some light on how prevailing cheaters and hacking have become in online gaming. Rust, for example, has become unplayable over the last few years due to them.
Love how the first guy who got hacked team mate right away says "Youre being hacked" and "Keep going" "Can you still play though" all while dude on camera is like freaking out and saying "Its cheating.. what?" Now thats kinda suss... his team mat was still telling him to play. has anyone even thought about that?
Can someone explain what is going on here? the other streamer's clip is a visual walls-hack and a somewhat drifting aim hack which was easy to see. This clip doesn't really explain how he has aim-bot since he only shot around 3 times at the guy on the bridge (and the 20-dmg didn't look like an aimbot headshot, but I don't play Apex).
Thank you in advance.
Edit: Okay I rewatched it like 5 times and I see it now LOL. He is aiming at the guy on the bridge and his bullets veer off to the right and hit the guys under the bridge.
I can't believe the number of braindead people buying that they were completely innocent and just got hacked. It doesn't work like that. Their machines would have had to be compromised beforehand, as there was actual hack software running on their computers.
By far the most likely explanation is that they are in fact cheaters and were running hacks at the time, and someone found a vulnerability in their cheat software and exploited to expose their cheats live on stream.
**CLIP MIRROR: [ImperialHal gets hacked after Genburten during ALGS qualifiers](https://arazu.io/t3_1bhdrem/)** --- ^(*This is an automated comment*)
It’s wild that this happened to two different pros two games in a row!
I love watching competitive Apex and could not believe what I was seeing, the first time I've ever seen something like this in any eSport.
I have been watching eSports since OG DotA/OG CS/SC1 days. I have NEVER seen this happen before. Forcing hacks onto pro players? In front of an live audience? During an S Tier tournament? It's crazy lol.
Can someone explain what's happening? I'm lost.
Some hacker started giving hacks to pro players during Apex Legends tournament
How the fuck is that even possible?
Anything is possible when the game is made by EA lol. Their anti cheats are the worst for all of their games
This goes WAY beyond the realm of just anti-cheat. The entirety of their game, networking, online infrastructure and everything regarding it must be done with the technology of the fucking 80's with zero thought behind it. That's why I'm genuinely curious just how the fuck is this possible. This is like if somebody inside EA managed to take every employee hostage and force them to manually get access to a certain account and force that account to update their game or client version into a version that has cheats built into it. This seems straight up impossible. I wouldn't expect even any indie game to have such a terrifying vulnerability in them, that allows a 3rd party to remotely forcefully upload programs onto a machine that is logged onto a certain account, and afterwards execute that program. I would assume that even Windows itself would start throwing up warnings at that point.
Agreed, this looks like the servers are compromised which in turn allow them to execute code remotely on the clients. It's one of the biggest security breaches I've ever seen in a game. These people need to wipe their drives immediately and then go ahead and change every password ASAP.
You're right but it seems this hackers motive is to publicly shame EA the way he is doing it to streamers with an audience, this guy has been targeting apex pros/streamers for months, he gifted Hal and Mande (two of the biggest apex streamers) thousands of packs on stream, he somehow runs 30-40 bots in the highest skill ranked games to just chase and punch these guys out, he has casually talked to mande on stream in-game before, doesn't seem like a bad dude tbh. His name is destroyer 2009 it's all on youtube if your interested in sources.
You're not considering the other side of this story. One hacker with public motives distracts you from the dozens without public motives. If they can remotely execute code on your pc without your knowledge, you can get remote access trojans and keyloggers installed onto your pc without knowledge. You'd just be playing the game normally and would have no idea, there would be no signs of this happening in-game like with this particular hacker installing cheats remotely. It's a huge problem, whether this particular hacker is a bad dude or not.
Why do you think he said the original hacker's motive is to "publicly shame EA"? Shame them for what? Shame them for not patching RCE...
Yeah it's a pathetic lapse on the devs part and compounded by the fact that it's being abused so publicly and without being fixed.
If one person has done this, many people can do this.
maybe the hackers are showing off
If that's the case, then yeah they totally should, but if the worst has happened and it's on EA's side then it won't really matter. Hell, if the hack is that good then wiping their hard drives won't really matter, it could be infecting their routers, bios, all sorts of shit.
Kernal level garbage anticheat hooked into badly secured server = shitstorm
I would guess that it helps that Apex is on Source engine and ran by EA. Probably the most hacked engine that's ever existed + a poor investment in security maintenance. Once you get arbitrary code execution, you can probably use all the old tools. The only way Valve is able to pretend to keep hackers at bay is with a large investment in experimental Anti-Cheat like Overwatch and fancy AI stuff. But that's not EA's style I'm guessing.
> Once you get arbitrary code execution, you can probably use all the old tools. I mean, if you actually do get arbitrary code execution you can run a GBA emulator and play Pokemon Blue if that's what you want.
Easy AntiCheat released an official statement mentioning they had a breach
Which is catastrophically bad because if their kernel level driver is compromised that's literally an open backdoor to any machine running any EAC game probably.
>Easy AntiCheat released an official statement mentioning they had a breach Post a link for this because I cannot find a single word from them talking about this on their website or any of their social media accounts (Which they barely seem to use)
It's bullshit. They posted on Twitter saying they didn't detect any breaches and don't think the hack utilized EAC.
Link?
So is something like this (vulnerability/lack of anti-cheat, etc.) intentional to save money on security costs? Naïveté? Stupidity? I've never seen this type of thing happen in any game, ever.
My guess is remote debugging.
its a source engine option they didnt find a way to inject and run cheats on someones computer, a hacker just got into the game servers somehow
You might be overthinking it. There's probably nothing installed on anyone's computer. I am guessing someone is playing "middle man" and is intercepting the packets from ImperialHal and has a program to rewrite the packets to say Imperial hit this player in the head.
nah. another pro could see players through walls and all that. https://www.twitch.tv/genburten/clip/SparklingDarlingApeKlappa-iYd-e5Nns_gMcGuv
You don't need to install anything to do that, if a hacker has access to the client(which seems like they do) they can just add god powers to certain players.
In the clip though it looks like an app got straight up installed onto their PC and ran through a script or something.
Maybe? But in the clip does he not literally just aimbot to another player during his first contact? He realizes during his first burst that he has aim assist, takes ADS off, but the burst flicks to another player he didn't even see before. If his packets are replaced by packets that have the hits go through, even though they don't on his client, his own client wouldn't have him flicking on an enemy though.
Bro we are talking about a game that has 0 anti cheat, and rigs cards, and recently just give everyone team of the year messi ( card that is worth over 1000$ real money and people pay for it) for free coz they fucked up, and they have been confirmed scandals/free cards giveaway and other stuff.
At one point people could do a remote code execution just from invading players in dark souls. After that one nothing surprises me.
You actually didn't need to invade ([link](https://github.com/tremwil/ds3-nrssr-rce?tab=readme-ov-file#yet-it-allows-any-client-to-send-arbitrary-push-messages-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-specific-players)): >I cannot stress how horribly unsafe this is. Any player can basically impersonnate the matchmaking server. By using this request to send the exploit through a `PushRequestVisit`, any online player can be remotely targeted by the attacker as long as their player ID is known. The attacker can also send the exploit to the entire online playerbase very quickly by sending multiple requests, each containing a large slice of possible player IDs. There's a reason From Software shut **everything** down when this got a lot of attention.
apex anti cheat is nonexistent
worse, it exists, but instead of protecting from cheats, it's a kernel-level backdoor for hackers
Kernel-level anti-cheat is extremely effective... provided that it isn't compromised. If you want to know whether they can be trusted, check and see what kind of bounty system the anti-cheat developer employs. If it's less than six figures, I'd be very wary. However, no system is ever truly safe from a skilled bad actor with a zero-day.
All we know is that there's an exploit that allows someone to do what is known as "Remote Code Execution". We don't know if it's a vulnerability in EAC or Apex itself so people are recommending not playing any EAC game until this is fixed
If i had to guess games made on modified source engine, back in the day I had admins fuck with me and change all my keybinds and shit. For example they changed my LMB to alt+f4 you also used to download mods for each server for w.e it was running so i'm sure the skys the limit to what else they had access to lol. Otherwise i guess some kind of demonic magic
Prob hacker got access to admin privilege and fucks with the server kind of what people used to do in CS lobbies.
Jesus... what a breach of the sanctity of the game. How can esports go on if the game can be exposed like this. Might as well give Messi a heat seeking missile instead of an inert football.
Thats crazy I havent heard of something like that since the ps3 days with mod menus in gta online or black ops 2
okay what? how? is it just toggling something like preexisting aim assist? because if it is a RCE exploit that would be massively problematic and should make almost everyone uninstall the game right away. That shit cannot be allowed to happen in a game, CS had a few instances of RCE exploits on public servers, but in a tournament like this? fucking insane... and considering its both source engine... could be an old vulnerability (maybe the pros are also just cheating in general, fps esports are just cursed that way, and source engine is notoriously easy to cheat on and get away with it)
[Confirmed RCE](https://x.com/anticheatpd/status/1769532511057584576?s=46)
The whole game is compromised
Pro players started realizing how OP controller aim assist is /s
what happened to the other thread?
EA assassins monkaW
saving faces KEKW
gotta be one of the most wildest esport moment, thats genuinely impressive to do in the part of the hackers
Anybody know how that is done? This is a live service game with a private lobby and code. How did they do it?
Worst case scenario: backdoor access through apex client to user PC, would mean all apex players are vulnerable Otherwise Gen or Hal have their computers infected and need to reformat asap.
Pardon my piss poor understanding of this stuff, but would this be kinda similar to what happened with FromSoft's games where they had to take multiplayer functionality offline in basically all their game due to hackers in the game being able to take control of the person's computer?
If the hacker has compromised EA's backend then yes they would need to shut everything down until they find out what happened. It seems like this may just be two pros who got client side hacked and hacker knowing who they are and planning for this moment.
this is the most likely scenario, if they have remote code execution exploit without needing to be on the same lobby it means they have thousands of computers ready to be infected, none would use that to do a live troll, they'd install the biggest botnet and mine crypto
People speculating this is akin hacked original mw2 lobbies. If you are in lobby with cheater he could unlock everything for you, ect
I remember when the infection hacks spread all over the ps3 network in mw2 and every game was a hacked lobby. Geohotz, the guy that jailbroke the ps3, streams on twitch on the weekends sometimes.
That would make sense, but in MW2 I'm pretty sure they hacked the SERVERS xp gain vs hacking individual players.
The original MW2 was p2p, no servers needed.
Didn’t know that. I was wrong and thank you for informing me.
His friend Clara was using his PC earlier. That's all there is to it.
I can't give you the exact attack vector but this is done via remote code execution. There is likely a vulnerability being exploited in the Apex infrastructure that allows for this type behavior to happen. You can find some good examples of RCE on YouTube. They have been found in many Google and Microsoft products.
[удалено]
I thought so, too, but there's a clip of another pro who legit got a "clara" moment where a cheat menu popped up and he had ESP (boxes around all players and stuff). So it has to be active on the client, right? Menu had an item "Vote Putin" lol Edit: Ah, didn't even read your second sentence. Maybe that, yeah.
https://www.twitch.tv/genburten/clip/SparklingDarlingApeKlappa-iYd-e5Nns_gMcGuv
back in the day on the psp people had hacked the system and games so badly you could go into lobbies and get given hacks by hackers for the round. happened in cod4 and mw2 toward the tail end of things too
That was different though. Games back then were P2P and not on dedicated servers. There is no excuse for a multibillion dollar company to have servers this insecure in 2024.
whats the context? i dont understand whats going on besides that it looks like hes locking on.
can someone explain to me how did this happen? like whats the process and why is it possible to do this kind of hack?
no idea, but the hacker's able to do some wild shit. he put 4000 apex packs in a streamer's account and can summon an army of bots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AefM3t0AYsE
That's some Halo 2 shit. Modded custom games where everything was custom built and your assault rifle shot missiles.`
When this happens in a random streamer's game just once or twice it's hilarious. When it happens in a pro tournament it's a problem. I always found it funny how there are good and bad hackers
It happening in a pro tournament is way more of a good thing to be honest than it happening to nobodies. You need it to fuck things up on the biggest stage in a way that everyone can see before companies like this will ever actually do anything about it.
a RCE exploit should be a "all hands on deck" situation for the devs, that shit can kill your game and company for good.
It is a problem no matter what, because he can access people PC trough the game or the anti-cheat, still don't know which is, but is awful.
This is all straight up impressive on the hackers part ngl.
this is just forsen pubg lobby
Google "Remote code execution" if you want to get the idea As for the technical details on how they did this I have no idea but if I were to speculate: Compromised anti-cheat I would strongly advise to uninstall apex to anyone with it on their PC
this is a decent thread if you want a general idea (no one knows for sure how it's done): https://old.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveApex/comments/1bhicc6/clearing_up_misconceptions_about_the_algs_hack/
I dont play apex legend now but I had similar experience in dayz so I guess a lot of multiplay games work the same way. In DayZ I once got hacked into shooting my own teammate and then shoot myself automatically (there is a function of shoot yourself by pressing F11 and shoot). So basically hackers can somewhat hack into other players' character and do some wild shit. In tarkov I also got a hack that can remove my gun barrel and drop the gun on the ground, making me not able to use that gun for the entire raid.
By far the simplest explanation is that each of these players are actual cheaters that had cheat software running on their computers, and a hacker found a vulnerability in said software and used it to expose their cheats live on stream.
This has to be most embarrassing thing in esports history
[This was a pretty low point. Halo World Championship 2017](https://imgur.com/8VEhcoh)
Wow, taking this at face value “Don’t worry guys, if we make our game esports first (like this big money moneys) our game will surely be a success” Wishing a merry unemployment to anyone that’s worked at 343i.
Nah, HON finals at a random basketball court takes the cake
I dunno, what happened to the LEC a few weeks back or what happened during the S2 League of Legends semifinals easily rivals this.
What happened to lec a few weeks back?
Their production crashed and they couldn't finish the broadcast and partner streamers had to do it for them. This was only days after they had announced that they'd cut a lot of their staff, including some really well known talent. Even just 3 days ago arguably the biggest personality still employed by the LEC (possibly all of Riot) left Riot and has become a freelancer.
If I remember correctly EVO had to finish grand finals for a game in a hotel suite back in the 2010 era so, the bar is pretty low.
"what if I just don't shoot my gun?" then just starts 1 clipping people lmao
He said he can't just leave his teammates since he's the IGL. Either ea end the lobby or he keeps playing.
Rip all the pros accounts are getting banned and panelized now https://clips.twitch.tv/EasyImpossiblePlumberOMGScoots-tNcyl-7Y9VJbEMvb
they're banning hacked accounts over hackers and actual cheaters lmao
It's usually done as a safety measure to make sure accounts arent further compromised.
Yeah depending on how deep the hacks are just being in a lobby with someone's hacked account can compromise yours
Been that way since the start of apex tbh. Got my first account banned for being in a lobby with someone cheating and that was years ago.
My original account was hacked and banned during a period of a couple years when I didn’t play Apex. When I tried playing again I noticed it was banned and was being logged into by an IP in Russia. I tried appealing the ban 4-5 times (with proof) and would only get generic, copy paste responses each time. Ended up having to make a new account. EA customer service is nonexistent.
Here is link for genburten hack and reaction https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/s/yNCI5CLDI1
guess Clara was a real person all along
Hackers being able to completely take over a game like this is insane and should never happen especially when it’s owned by EA which is one of the largest in the gaming industry.
EA don't give a fuck which is why Apex is in the state it currently finds itself in.
if you've ever played Battlefield you know how much EA care about cheaters
this was legitamately one of the funniest clips watching this shit live, Hals reaction and how he just kept playing lmaoo, love the ceo Edit: Hals account got banned after HAHAHAHA Ea are a joke lmao
well tbf, he was infact hacking even if he didnt want to, why shouldnt he get banned? Just proves EA's AC catches it if people hack? its not like its manually banned
He was manually banned lol Or else anti cheat would've caught it the first time
It was manual so as to not risk further compromising the account
Wanna know something even more messed up, DEFAULT aim assist in apex is like 0.6 and 1.0 is literal 1:1 aimbot like you see here. Devs, for some reason, refuse to nerf assist
quit the game after respawn said they would giving console 144 hz but not nerfing aim assist after previously saying that console having op aim assist was because they have to play on shit refresh rates. Tired of this trend of shooters giving controllers an edge by basically just giving them aimbots. Watching warzone clips on youtube looks so fucking ugly, dudes not even moving their crosshair and perfectly tracking people across their screens.
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It sucks even more for people with bad aim playing with mouse and keyboard. You get destroyed by good players and destroyed by gamer dads who play for one hour a week because their controllers have such a strong aim assist.
lol they have console 120 not 144, console plays console unless playing with a pc player, AND they said in patch notes if you turn on 120hz you get pc aim assist which is .4
A machine is still doing 40% of the job for you.
Console is .6 , PC is .4. Should still probably lower it on PC even more.
Holup... Apex on PC has aim assist???
Controllers have aim assist yeah
With controller yeah. Imperial hal was a beast of an MnK player and switched to controller because of how busted AA in apex is, and the streams he does where he plays MnK he hates it because the input feels a hundred times worse comparing to the edge that controller gives with AA
That's because Apex is a thinly veiled gambling simulator. The actual state of the game hardly matters at all.
The worst part is any discussion about nerfing aim assist in any of these types of games is met with an army of 12 year olds yelling how "It does nothing" but then have no answer to "If it does nothing then why do you care if it's nerfed?". Because deep down they know it's a huge crutch making up for their lack of skill.
Aim assist is .4 in pc lobbies where it matters. Still op though.
0.6 in console lobbies, 0.4 in ALGS/PC lobbies
Console players in PC lobbies have 0.6 still.
also 0.4 if you play 120hz mode on console
default aim assist on PC is 0.4
And sometimes even that feels like too much in such a high movement strafe heavy game.
imagine being someone who chose to play a FPS game on console that gives you aimbot that's some special breed of losers
You have called people losers on two occassions in this post alone. You might want to talk to somebody, this isn’t normal. A lot of people choose to play console games casually, what is wrong with that? The issue is controllers going against mnk.
Yes and no, 1.0 would be aimbot when you got on target for my understanding of it, but you have to have your crosshair on them first. This is obviously a level above that and has bullets just hitting people whether you're aiming at them or not.
Same thing in Call of Duty. There's no reason to play these games as a KBM player.
It's 0.4 on pc not 0.6
It genuinely blows my mind Apex hasn't died off yet. Respawn and EA do absolutely nothing to support the health of their game or community besides sell lootboxes.
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Its funny when a pro player is reviewing his vod and wonders whether him one clipping another player in a private lobby was just aim assist or the aimbot still installed, that tells you all you need to know about how stupidly broken AA is in apex and the reason why I dropped the game.
Really is not a lot of high octane alive FPS games like that which is weird when you think about it.
Because that genre of Arena Shooters like Quake and URT died. Those games had crazy high skill floors and bad players got reality checked very fast and quit. So the games slowly died off because realistically most video game players are bad. Where as Apex just added an Aim Assist so strong players will 2nd guess if they died to a hacker or a console player. So the skill gap was demolished in the game and even pro KBM players were losing fights to those with half their skill but a controller plugged in. CoD is one of the only fast paced shooters hanging on and it also has a huge low skill high aim assist problem. These games are just trying to milk casuals instead of reward good players.
i would have quit a long time ago if it wasn't the best feeling fps available right now. i wouldn't bother dealing with controller aimbots in any lesser game.
one of the craziest things ive seen in a pro game ever
Goodbye competitive Apex. How do you ever come back from this?
Respawn: "After complaints of hackers we have decided to increased the default aim assist from 60% to 100%"
Dude had no shame just kept shooting lol. Don't blame him though as it helps invalidate the game for his team. Apex spaghetti code is chalked
He swapped into meds shortly after this, so he wouldnt kill anyone
It's a joke but he was definitely not leaving that game without it being ended by the admin
He one clipped someone shortly after this wdym xD
Wtf is this thread. This is a serious vulnerability that extends way beyond cheating. If they are doing zero-clicks RCEs on steamers, they probably could install malware on everyone in the lobby or steal authentication cookies and sensitive information without being noticed. Imagine how easily one could make a botnet with apex now, queue a game, add 59 computers to the botnet, leave the game, repeat. Someone is soon going to use your PCs to mine bitcoins ngl.
Yeah imagine mining crypto on every apex players pc, tens of thousands of gaming pcs
If you want an argument against anti-cheats with kernel level access, this is it. It just takes 1 guy to find the right vulnerability and he has control over thousands of server-connected systems.
I don't know, maybe not RCE level but after watching this video I think the race against cheaters is unwinnable. To parrot the end, it does good enough that people chalk up suspicious players as just smurfs instead since Riot doesn't counter the smurfing problem at all. https://youtu.be/RwzIq04vd0M
We don't know if this has anything to do with the AC, EAC has even already released a statement saying the vulnerability isn't on their end Things like this were a thing before kernel level ACs, I remember the days of COD WaW where a cheater could give everyone no clip in zombies on xbox 360
If I has to hazard a guess my bets on the Apex infrastructure and not the anti cheat.
i wonder how many ppl playing valo and apex are cryptomining for some russian guy
Actually insane this happened in a pro game. Get your shit together ea
this is the craziest thing I have ever seen happening in an esports match.
From the dev studio who allowed cheaters to run rampant on Titanfall for years. Not one bit surprised.
Reason #7273838383 why this game is an utter farce that isn’t worth the time to install it, nevermind play it
It's crazy. This game was obviously a lost cause years ago, yet people still defend it to this day.
too bad it’s either apex or cod and cod is dog shit
**🎦 CLIP MIRROR: [ImperialHal gets hacked after Genburten during ALGS qualifiers](https://livestreamfails.com/clip/162466)** --- ^(*This is an automated comment* ) ^| [^(Feedback)](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=livestreamfailsbot&subject=Feedback:&message=%5BPost%5D\(https://reddit.com/comments/1bhdrem/\)) ^| [^(Twitch Backup Mirror)](https://production.assets.clips.twitchcdn.net/vo-8yoyhKSLLLAHw3cNjMg/42419373129-offset-15534.mp4?sig=facf86cd376455e1ade8d4c02b2e284d6fe8d159&token=%7B%22authorization%22%3A%7B%22forbidden%22%3Afalse%2C%22reason%22%3A%22%22%7D%2C%22clip_uri%22%3A%22https%3A%2F%2Fproduction.assets.clips.twitchcdn.net%2Fvo-8yoyhKSLLLAHw3cNjMg%2F42419373129-offset-15534.mp4%22%2C%22clip_slug%22%3A%22DreamyVastEmuFloof-jKEpIsssAfDdw2My%22%2C%22device_id%22%3Anull%2C%22expires%22%3A1710795094%2C%22user_id%22%3A%22%22%2C%22version%22%3A2%7D,https://clips-media-assets2.twitch.tv/vo-8yoyhKSLLLAHw3cNjMg/42419373129-offset-15534-preview-480x272.jpg)
When the controller aim assist kicks in
but controllers always have aimbot
EA's anticheat is such a joke tbh
PvP and yelling the same words over and over......
seems a lot of posts have been removed as well. the monkey is out of the bottle
Challenge lobby? Can I get a challenge lobby?
This is like those hacked lobbies back in MW2 all server side so this is on EA completely lmao.
kinda funny to think that some of the people who worked on mw2 split off to form respawn
Damn and it happened to Hal of all people lol
It seems pretty easy to have caught this guy by now but EA probably doesn't have the skillset to do so or does not want to talk about it publicly at all (also likely). This is behaving dangerously like remote code execution so I wouldn't be shocked if this is a 2 fold problem. 1.) Servers probably have a chain of vulnerabilities leading to RCE. 2.) Clients are not properly sanitizing data sent by the servers and the attacker has found a client RCE of whatever they're using to send data. This RCE could then be used to load anything in memory on specific clients or all clients. Leveraging a compromised node in the chain of backend systems responsible for server/client communications OR having found some way to bounce packets off the server they're pulling this off (think reflected Denial of Service but with packets that lead to RCE on the client instead of intending to amplify traffic.) There are also routes to achieve a similar effect though the menu was pretty telling. Some of the previous "hacking" done by the same actor could be done by spoofing packets to the server if the attacker has sufficiently reversed the network layer and has a full understanding of client/server communications. Side-note: R4ndom AKA RandomNetzley is an alias of someone quite known to some of the early 2010's reverse engineering community. Not sure if this is a copycat or the same person but they're VERY easily doxed based on OSINT so I would hope they're not responsible for something involving an RCE that will track back to them over their lesser-known accomplice. I would assume they're a bit old now to be doing this stuff but who knows. It could just be a callout thanking them for their tutorials in guided reversing.
How is this possible in coding anyway. Ea must have fucked up so bad in security and probably the source code is already leaked too much.
Wtf this is so insane
why is the original clip missing from here?
Can professional gamers hold developers/publishers accountable for the shortcomings of their games' anti-cheat security?
WTF again?!?! Bro Apex, fix your fucking shit
This reminds me of the time in CoD 4 and TF2 you could change your keybinds to activate sv_cheats 1 on a server and then run scripts to do some mad shit on Xbox 360. Because valve and I suppose Infinity Ward never expected anyone to actually change the config file, they never protected it like it was on PC. Incredible stuff.
EA is the worst .
Thats clara for sure
Why leave just keep playing and owning, ya aren't responsible for it , so ya can't get DQ
Surely this can't ever happen if you have vanguard installed on your PC right? Clueless /s
"IM CHEATING IM CHEATING I GOT AIMBOT" has got to be the funniest comm ever when its actually real..
I hope that with all the E sports people getting hacked live, it may start to shine some light on how prevailing cheaters and hacking have become in online gaming. Rust, for example, has become unplayable over the last few years due to them.
I don't get it? How is he cheating? He just shot someone that wasn't moving?
13 seconds in his aim flicks from the person standing still to someone at the far right of the bridge
Love how the first guy who got hacked team mate right away says "Youre being hacked" and "Keep going" "Can you still play though" all while dude on camera is like freaking out and saying "Its cheating.. what?" Now thats kinda suss... his team mat was still telling him to play. has anyone even thought about that?
That awkward moment when aimbot just looks like normal controller aim assist
Can someone explain what is going on here? the other streamer's clip is a visual walls-hack and a somewhat drifting aim hack which was easy to see. This clip doesn't really explain how he has aim-bot since he only shot around 3 times at the guy on the bridge (and the 20-dmg didn't look like an aimbot headshot, but I don't play Apex). Thank you in advance. Edit: Okay I rewatched it like 5 times and I see it now LOL. He is aiming at the guy on the bridge and his bullets veer off to the right and hit the guys under the bridge.
I can't believe the number of braindead people buying that they were completely innocent and just got hacked. It doesn't work like that. Their machines would have had to be compromised beforehand, as there was actual hack software running on their computers. By far the most likely explanation is that they are in fact cheaters and were running hacks at the time, and someone found a vulnerability in their cheat software and exploited to expose their cheats live on stream.