Several Apex Legends professionals have come under attack during today’s ALGS regional finals with the likes of DarkZero’s Genburten and TSM’s ImperialHal granted game-breaking cheats due to a serious security breach.
Genburten was hit by the breach first, with onlookers shocked as the Australian sharpshooter suddenly froze mid-game, then was given access to Apex’s observer tool without pressing a button—essentially giving him wallhacks. “I’m getting hacked, I’m getting hacked,” he said, frustratingly leaving the match to prevent breaches of competitive integrity.
A short time later, ImperialHal suffered a similar fate, with the Apex star given an aimbot halfway through his match. After firing at one target in the distance, his bullets immediately snapped to another unseen target. “I have aimbot, tell them I have aimbot!” ImperialHal said, doing his best to hold fire in an ensuing fight before the server was shut down.
ImperialHal was then issued a full Apex ban and a matchmaking penalty after he then attempted to queue for a regular ranked game. “I 100 percent said I’m just waiting on the day [Destroyer2009] starts fucking with the ALGS,” ImperialHal said, adding he’s stumped as to why Respawn had not planned for such an intrusion and how the anti-cheat could detect and ban him but not the actual hacker.
The Apex Legends esports team has already issued a statement shortly after the incident, shutting down and postponing the NA finals “due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised.” Dot Esports has since reached out to the esports team but there is no estimated time for when the ALGS NA finals to resume just yet.
It is believed the breaches are the result of Destroyer2009, a notorious hacker in the Apex community, especially because Genburten’s chat window showing a message with Destroyer’s name and the phrase “Apex hacking global series” once the wallhack was live on his account. It is not yet clear whether Destroyer gained access to the player’s accounts or if the hacker used features like webhooks, as explained by Apex analyst Desk, to infiltrate the servers themselves.
Regardless of what method was used to deploy the hacks, it’s a serious breach of EA and Respawn’s servers that an ALGS regional competition is compromised as easily as it was during today’s Apex matches. Major accounts in the scene are calling for players to uninstall Apex as neither the developer nor the publisher has indicated whether the wider player base is at risk.
