Apex Legends Tournament Hacker Speaks, Swears It Was ‘A Joke’

A person accountable for hacking an Apex Legends world match over the weekend has revealed their motivations: they did it “only for enjoyable.”

That quote comes from a brand new TechCrunch interview with one of many hackers, who goes by Destroyer2009. In it, they element that their choice to target the Apex Legends Global Series esports match (which boasts a prize pool of $5 million) was based mostly partially in a need to fiddle, but in addition to pressure developer Respawn to patch the exploit they utilized. In response to the hacker, whose shenanigans forced the ALGS to postpone the tournament “as a result of aggressive integrity of this sequence being compromised,” the hack was a benevolent one.

“Not many individuals would have used an exploit like that in a fully harmless approach for gamers,” Destroyer2009 instructed TechCrunch. “Simply think about if it wasn’t a joke and we didn’t put any memes within the cheat, I’m fairly certain you’ll be able to damage somebody’s profession if they’d a cheat pop up on a match.” The hack happened in the course of the North American finals, and appeared to have solely affected two gamers: Noyan “Genburten” Ozkose, who was given a wallhack cheat that allow him see via partitions, and Phillip “ImperialHal” Dosen, who immediately had an aimbot (excellent accuracy) utilized to his weapons. Whereas the professionals had been shouting about being hacked, an in-game chatbot reportedly confirmed messages from the hackers, and a window popped up that confirmed choices for quite a lot of cheats that could possibly be enabled, like autofire, magic bullets, goal lock, and one which mentioned, bizarrely, “Vote Putin.”

Movies of the hack despatched the Apex Legends and esports communities right into a tailspin, which gamers worrying if their very own, informal matches had been now unsafe. However Destroyer2009 assured TechCrunch that they didn’t hack Genburten’s and Dosen’s computer systems, and the exploit “had nothing to do with the server and [they’ve] by no means touched something outdoors of the Apex course of.”

However Destroyer2009, who labored alongside one other hacker known as R4ndom to hack the ALGS, refused to inform TechCrunch what exploits they used, saying “I actually don’t need to go into the main points till every thing is totally patched and every thing goes again to regular.” Why not? As a result of Respawn and writer Digital Arts don’t provide monetary compensation for gamers who discover and report bugs and exploits. Destroyer2009 believes that Respawn “[knows] tips on how to patch it with out anybody reporting it to them.”

Respawn issued a statement on X (formerly Twitter) on March 19, stating that devs have “deployed the primary of a layered sequence of updates to guard the Apex Legends participant neighborhood and create a safe expertise for everybody.”