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

A person chargeable for hacking an Apex Legends international event 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 resolution to goal the Apex Legends World Sequence esports event (which boasts a prize pool of $5 million) was based mostly partially in a want to fiddle, but additionally to drive 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 completely harmless approach for gamers,” Destroyer2009 informed 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 break somebody’s profession if that they had a cheat pop up on a event.” 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 out of the blue 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 a wide range of cheats that might 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 exterior of the Apex course of.”

However Destroyer2009, who labored alongside one other hacker referred to as R4ndom to hack the ALGS, refused to inform TechCrunch what exploits they used, saying “I actually don’t need to go into the small print till every part is totally patched and every part 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] learn 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 group and create a safe expertise for everybody.”