The hacker who hacked into Apex Legends last week and thus disrupted the Global Series finals did it just for fun, TechCrunch reports.
During the tournament, participants began to report that cheats had appeared on their devices: one had a wall hack, another had an aim bot.
The attack was made possible by a remote code execution exploit that allows an attacker to install third-party software on players’ devices through the game. It can be not only a cheat, but anything.
During the hacker attacks, the game’s chatbot displayed messages that appeared to come from hackers: “Apex Global Series hack, by Destroyer2009 & R4andom”.
The hacker, Destroyer2009, gave an interview to TechCrunch in which he claimed responsibility for the hack. He said that he did it “just for fun” and to force the developers of Apex Legends to fix the vulnerability he exploited.
Destroyer2009 refused to provide details of the hack inside the game or which vulnerabilities it exploited, so as not to inform people who might use it for malicious purposes.
“I really don’t want to go into the details until everything is fully patched and everything goes back to normal,” the hacker said.
The only thing Destroyer2009 had to say about the attack was that the vulnerability had nothing to do with the server, and the hacker didn’t have to use anything but the Apex process itself.
The hacker also added that he did not hack into the players’ computers. According to him, the hacking actions never went beyond the game.
Destroyer2009 noted that it did not report the vulnerability to Respawn because neither the company nor the game’s publisher, Electronic Arts, offers a bug bounty program.
“Just imagine if it wasn’t a joke and we didn’t put any memes in the cheat, I’m pretty sure you can ruin someone’s career if they had a cheat pop up on a tournament,” Destroyer2009 said, defending his actions and trying to show that he never had any malicious intentions.
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