Easy Anti-Cheat dev assures players there’s no RCE vulnerability after Apex hacking

Easy Anti-Cheat revived its X account for this.

Apex Legends and Final Fantasy collaboration skins.
Image via Respawn

In the wake of the notorious hacking incident that hit the Apex Legends Global Series regional finals, the developer behind Easy Anti-Cheat has issued a comment to say there are no vulnerabilities with its software.

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In case you missed it, professional Apex Legends players found themselves victims of hacking earlier today during their ALGS matches. The live event was disrupted when one player was given wallhacks and another an aimbot mid-match, prompting the North American finals to be delayed “due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised.”

ImperialHal from TSM sits at his PC while competing at the ALGS Playoffs.
ImperialHal was banned after unwillingly receiving an aimbot from a hacker. Photo by Joe Brady via ALGS

Although no one knows exactly how the hacker in question pulled it off, there were naturally concerns among the Apex Legends community that it was done via the game’s anti-cheat software, Easy Anti-Cheat. But the developer behind the software itself has stated this is not the case.

In a March 18 post on its X (formerly Twitter) account—the first one since May 2019—the Easy Anti-Cheat developer wrote it had conducted an investigation and is “confident that there is no RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited.” Many other games also use Easy Anti-Cheat, including Fortnite and Dead by Daylight, but this should mean none of them face similar security risks.

If this is the case, then the hacker, an infamous individual named Destroyer2009, may have gained access through Apex Legends itself, but this is unconfirmed at the time of writing. Even so, it’s been recommended that participants in the ALGS (and maybe even regular players) uninstall Apex Legends and take other precautions to ensure they’re not impacted by any malicious software.

The last week or so has been frankly awful for Apex Legends and its community. Even before all this, the game has been inundated with cheaters, particularly with the advent of Season 20, prompting content creators like Lulu to beg developer Respawn for a solution. On top of that, Respawn became the latest studio to be affected by the ongoing trend of layoffs within the games industry, with an unspecified number of people from the Apex Legends team losing their jobs.

Author
Image of Michael Beckwith
Michael Beckwith
Staff writer at Dot Esports covering all kinds of gaming news. A graduate in Computer Games Design and Creative Writing from Brunel University who's been writing about games since 2014. Nintendo fan and Sonic the Hedgehog apologist. Knows a worrying amount of Kingdom Hearts lore. Has previously written for Metro, TechRadar, and Game Rant.