Last week, an Apex Legends Global Series tournament was rocked by a situation that saw competitors hacked live on stream – while they were in the game. In an instant, players went from innocently competing to having exploits pop up that allowed them to see the location of every player on the map. It forced an immediate end and postponement of the tournament and an investigation was immediately launched – but the perpetrator was quickly uncovered.
In a recent interview with Tech Crunch, the hacker, known online as ‘Destroyer2009’, explained why he hacked the competitors.
‘Just For Fun’
Following the scandal, thousands of Apex Legends players avoided the game as though it were plagued, out of fear that they too would suffer at the hands of some unseen cheater. In the interview with Tech Crunch, Destroyer2009 explained that he hacked the players ‘just for fun’, but he never directly interacted with their devices. Instead, he leant on a vulnerability in the game to mess with the tournament, and stressed that the hacks ‘never went outside the game’.
Bizarrely, Destroyer2009 tried to justify his behaviour by suggesting it ‘could have been worse’:
Just imagine if it wasn’t a joke and we didn’t put any memes in the cheat, I’m pretty sure you can ruin someone’s career if they had a cheat pop up on a tournament.
He even insisted he’d picked his victims specifically because they were ‘nice guys’ who deserved the free attention and views they got from the incident. At this point, it’s nothing if not a testament to how some hackers and malicious operators have developers on strings, manipulating their games with ease.
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