Apex Legends pros 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 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 as he was given 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.
It is believed the breaches are the result of Destroyer2009, a notorious hacker in the Apex community, with 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.
Apex Legends‘ esports team issued a statement shortly after the incident shutting down and postponing the NA finals “due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised.” We don’t have an ETA on when we can expect the ALGS NA finals to resume, only that more information will be shared soon.
ImperialHal was 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, 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.
Regardless of the method by which the hacks happened, 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 matches.
This story is being updated…
