Last month, a hacker wreaked havoc during an esports tournament of the popular shooter game Apex Legends, hacking two well-known streamers mid-game to appear to be using cheats.
A month later, it looks like the hacking saga may have come to an end with game developers patching the bug that the hacker exploited.
Due to the hack, the organizers had to suspend the tournament on March 17. Two days later, Apex Legends developer Respawn said on X’s official account that it had “deployed the first in a series of multi-layered updates to protect the Apex Legends player community.” Then a week later, the the company wrote that it had “Added another update intended to further protect our players and ensure the competitive integrity of Apex Legends.”
Respawn’s posts don’t clearly say that the updates fix bugs that were used during the tournament. But the hacker behind the cheating scandal told TechCrunch this week that Respawn’s patches fixed the vulnerability it had exploited to hack the two streamers.
“The feat I have used [Apex Legends Global Series] it has been fully patched,” the hacker, who goes by Destroyer2009, said in an online chat.
Destroyer2009, who previously told TechCrunch that he had hacked the two streamers “for fun,” said he did not want to reveal technical details of the bug he exploited, even if it has now been fixed.
“Nobody likes it when serious vulnerabilities in your product are publicly exposed. I asked my friend and we both agreed that we don’t really want to publicly expose what happened from a technical point of view,” the hacker said, referring to a friend he worked with to develop the hack.
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Refers to an unrelated in-game bug update from Respawn this week, Destroyer2009 said:[I] don’t think it fair to embarrass them still more.’
Destroyer2009 said he tested his exploit after Respawn announced the second update on March 26, though he said it’s possible it was patched earlier because he didn’t have a chance to test it before.
Destroyer2009’s hacks were high-profile, disruptive, and caused quite a stir in the Apex Legends community. The two streamers aimed, ImperialHal and Genburtenthey have a total of 2.5 million followers on the game streaming platform Twitch and enough but Apex Legends players and streamers comment on it news about the hacks on their channels.
However, Respawn is not available for the patches it released. TechCrunch asked Respawn and Electronic Arts, the owners of the development studio, to confirm whether the exploit used by Destroyer2009 is indeed patched, and if so, when it was patched.
But neither Respawn nor Electronic Arts responded to TechCrunch’s multiple requests for comment. The two companies did not respond to requests for comment in recent weeks either.
Meanwhile, Destroyer2009 said he won’t be doing any more public hacks for now because “something more serious than [Apex tournament hack] accident will already be considered as real hacking with all the consequences like that [probably] I’ll just play the game until it’s boring as usual.”
