Technology

59605 readers

4065 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

468

Apex Legends streamers surprised to find aimbot and other hacks added to their PCs in the middle of major competition via anti-cheat software (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/technology

89 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Wow it finally happened. So glad I switched to steam running on linux mint last week. I refused to install helldivers because it wanted to install some no holds barred god level permissions anti-cheat software. Windows 11 was the last straw for me. Good times..

The volunteers at the Anti-Cheat Police Department have since issued a PSA announcing, "There is currently an RCE exploit being abused in [Apex Legends]" and that it could be delivered via from the game itself, or its anti-cheat protection. "I would advise against playing any games protected by EAC or any EA titles", they went on to say.

As for players of the tournament, they strongly recommended taking protective measures. "It is advisable that you change your Discord passwords and ensure that your emails are secure. also enable MFA for all your accounts if you have not done it yet", they said, "perform a clean OS reinstall as soon as possible. Do not take any chances with your personal information, your PC may have been exposed to a rootkit or other malicious software that could cause further damage."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 60 points 8 months ago (3 children)

There is currently no evidence of an RCE exploit in EAC, and EAC themselves as well as their owner, Epic, have both denied the existence of an RCE in their software.

There's a video from about a month ago in which ImperialHal and Genburten (on separate occasions) are in a match against the person named in the messages sent by the exploit on Genburten's machine.

It's possible that they were in contact with the hacker after that point and that he tricked them into downloading something they shouldn't have.

Otherwise, it's also possible that there is an exploit in Apex/Source that the hacker used. He may have been able to get their IP during the public match a month ago and then use it to target them during the competition.

Beyond what was seen during the competition, the hacker was also able to gift thousands of Apex packs to several players (seemingly without paying for them) and was able to get 40+ "bot" players into a single match and to all target an individual player. He also claimed to be able to open crates on another player's account. These other exploits seem to indicate that he has elevated access to both the server and to multiple APIs, but none of them indicate elevated access to user machines in general.

[–] merthyr1831 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Cancel my comment about this being a possible 0day or whatever. They were playing this tournament on their personal systems, which makes it way easier for someone to accidentally download malicious software without players' consent.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

a video

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.