Apex Legends has postponed the North America ALGS Regional Finals after a hacker breached the private lobby.
On March 17, match 4 of the ALGS NA Regional Finals was cut short after two pro players noticed a sudden shift in their aim and visuals. First, DarkZero’s Noyan “Genburten” Ozkose was gifted unsolicited hacks, and a short while later, TSM’s Phillip “ImperialHal” Dosen suffered the same fate. Consequently, the games were postponed to an unknown date.
During game 3, Genburten was able to detect enemies through the walls. The DarkZero controller instantly realized that something was off and disconnected from the server for the sake of game integrity.
But it was no bug. When Genbutren logged out, the hacker sent a message to the entire lobby that read “Apex hacking global series by Destoryer2009 &R4ndom.”
The game continued, but not for too long. In match 4, ImperialHal started popping heads a bit too smoothly, alerting him of a similar situation.
“Wait…What the f—? I am getting hacked,” ImperialHal yelled. When his teammate asked if he could play, he said, “It’s cheating.”
When he realized he indeed had aimbot, ImperialHal decided to drop his control but stayed on the server. This was enough cause for the admins to shut down the breached game.
Soon after, Apex Legends Esports announced that the finals had been postponed in light of the compromised match but didn’t reveal more information.
While the aimbot was not really his fault, the game anti-cheat still detected the suspicious activity. After the ALGS game was postponed, the pro player received a ban from Apex Legends when he tried playing a competitive game.
As of now, he can’t play Apex Legends or other EA games. But it’s not really that big of a bummer, considering the
Anti-Cheat Police Department
has been warning players to stay away from EA and Easy AC games for a while on Twitter.
According to a credible account, the hack pushed by notorious Apex Legends hacker Destroyer in 2009 injected cheats into the PCs of the pro players. This means that all players are currently vulnerable to this powerful RCE (Remote Code Execution) hack.
Players are furious at EA for letting the hacker get away or allowing this to happen at a large scale in the first place. According to the community, the occurrence of this at the ALGS level speaks volumes about the fragility of Apex Legends anti-cheat. The developer hasn’t said anything more about the issue yet.
Fariha Bhatti
About Fariha Bhatti
Fariha Bhatti is a long-time gaming writer who loves competitive FPS games and slots with particularly fun themes. She got her start playing classic games developed by SNK, from legendary fighting game series The King of Fighters to challenging platform franchise Metal Slug. She now spends most of her time playing Valorant and Counter-Strike 2 while working her way through new slot releases to find her next favorite. Fariha has been published at PCGamesN, TalkEsport and ONE Esports.
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