Easy Anti-Cheat responds to Apex Legends pro players being hacked mid-game

In what seems like a first, Apex Legends professional players were hijacked by a hacker during the Apex Legends Global Series to be given cheats, resulting in the NA finals being postponed.

The Apex Legends North American finals were infiltrated by at least two hackers named "Destroyer2009" and "R4andom", who managed to somehow gain access to at least two professional players' PCs during a match. As the match was being streamed to thousands of fans around the world, a message box briefly popped up and then disappeared, which was followed by the player realizing that they had aimbot, wallhacks, and other cheats. Shortly after the discovery, the match was promptly ended.

Following the shutdown of the match Anti-Cheat Police Department, a group of volunteers that specialize in gathering intelligence on cheats to detect and disrupt cheating vendors, took to its X account to provide a public service announcement, stating that an RCE exploit was used to gain access to the players' PCs. For those that don't know, an RCE exploit is a "remote code execution", which means the hackers were able to execute codes on the target machines remotely.

• Read more: Apex Legends pro player hack sparks grave warning for millions of gamers

Unfortunately, an RCE exploit is one of the worst forms of vulnerabilities as it means the hacker is able to not only inject cheats into professional Apex Legends players' PCs but also execute any code they want, such as malware or ransomware that could be designed to scrape sensitive personal information. The Anti-Cheat Police Department recommended all professional players who participated in the tournament to take measures to protect their personal information and perform a clean reinstall of their operating system.

• Read more: Apex Legends pro players get hacked during NA finals, EA confirmed 'compromised'

Furthermore, the Anti-Cheat Police Department stated that its unsure if this RCE exploit being abused is within Apex Legends or Epic Games' Easy Anti-Cheat software used to protect dozens of popular games, such Battlefield and Fortnite. The Anti-Cheat Police Department recommended gamers from playing Apex Legends or any titles using Easy-Anti Cheat until a statement was made by EA, Respawn Entertainment, or Easy Anti-Cheat.

Easy-Anti Cheat has since taken to its X account to post an update, which is the first post the account has done since May 2019. The company wrote that it is "confident that there is no RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited," which, if correct, means Apex Legends contains an RCE exploit, with the Anti-Cheat Police Department recently posting that it is a Source Engine issue, which Apex Legends' engine is a custom design of.