Technology

...your PC may have been exposed to a rootkit or other malicious software that could cause further damage."

"The rootkit you installed on your pc allowed a rootkit or other malicious software to be installed on your PC."

Fyi, it's "no holds barred" as in no type of hold is disallowed. "no holes barred" is a decidedly different sort of event

The real cheats are the proprietary software we installed along the way.

leopards.exe has eaten your face and will continue.

[OK] [Yes] [I deserve it]

Hacking aside it is funny to me that the anti-cheat made it possible to enable cheats.

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.

The missing context here (not your fault, i think people reporting this are being misleading) is that they were using their personal systems in this tournament. That means whatever dodgy software they've installed can't be monitored in a controlled environment, and claims of it being EAC's fault is unfounded.

A proper tournament would have controlled hardware and software, even if playing remotely at a professional level. You can't guarantee these systems haven't been tampered with, even if the players insist on proper security measures.

The clips of the hacks being installed/activated are pretty crazy:

• Genburten hacked (and Zer0's POV)
• ImperialHal hacked

Note that the title has been edited: we do NOT know if this was EAC yet. The article says it "may have been." EAC has claimed it wasn't them (but of course they're going to claim that). Instead, it could have been Apex's source engine. Or, it could have been two individually compromised machines from software completely unrelated to Apex; remember, these are two high-profile targets, after all. We just have to wait and see what the real cause was. Regardless, I wouldn't play Apex for at least the next day or two, just to be safe.

Is there any actual evidence that this was done via an EAC exploit?

These could be two spear phished players with hacked PCs. (2 of the best and biggest audiences making them ideal targets). People have also mentioned r5 potentially being a culprit.

If this was eac related or even a bigger client side hack (RCE), you'd think it'd be more wide spread.

I wish the reporting on this was better all around. At this point I've seen no actual evidence of anything supporting RCE or that it was EAC to blame.

That was a strange path my mind took as I read the title, thinking it was a satire piece about competitors trying to sneak in cheats... Like, the "Anti-Cheat Police Department" couldn't be anything but a laughingstock.

So glad I switched to steam running on linux mint last week.

Doesn't EAC work on Linux?

googles

It sounds like it has for two years:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2022/03/01/apex-legends-now-works-on-linux-with-official-eac-support/

‘Apex Legends’ Now WORKS On Linux With Official EAC Support

I mean, I use Linux myself. But I don't know if Linux is a fix for "game I use may have vulnerabilities".

In theory, maybe Linux/Steam could isolate individual games (might be further along with Wayland than Windows is), but that's not how things work today. If you install software from Steam, it's got access to act as you, and if it has vulnerabilities that permit for remote compromise, then you'd be vulnerable as well.

Sounds fanciful.

EAC doesn't open up ports into your network as far as I'm aware.

Pretty much the only way to do RCE in games with no direct P2P connection is to send malformed data to the server, and then it sends that to the other clients, relying on things not being checked in two places. We've seen this a few times, in Dark Souls series and GTA Online.

I can't see for the life of me how EAC would cause that.

Is Helldiver's anti cheat that bad too? am I at least a little better off running the game through Proton on Linux or am I just providing a compatibility layer to a rootkit?

I do not buy this RCE in Apex/EAC rumor. This wouldn't be the first time "pro" gamers got caught with cheats. And, I wouldn't put it past the cheat developers to not only include trojan-like remote-control into their cheats, but use it to advertise their product during a streamed tournament. All press is good press. And honestly, they'd probably want people thinking it was a vulnerability in Apex/EAC rather than a trojan included with their cheat.

sadly it's been posted to Xitter, but I enjoy this 5 second clip of ImperialHal (one of the affected players):

https://twitter.com/babyducksss/status/1769541847829913925

yeah, totally not a compromised PC

So about those holes... We gonna bar them?

So, lemme get this straight: allowing remote parties to install malware (DRM) on your system results in allowing remote parties to install malware on your system? Wow, who could have known! Certainly not the distributors of the step-one malware, am I right?

I'm certain there's a couple of lessons to be learned here (install and run games as normal, non-elevated users, people! It's easy to do on Linux) but I'm also somehow certain Big Corpos are going to stick their heads into the sand regarding such lessons.

Oh well, the pirate way it is.

I imagine their surprise came across kind of like this

“what is this? I bought a xbox card! what is this? i don’t even know what that is!”

“I would advise against playing any games protected by EAC or any EA titles”, they went on to say.

Easy. I specifically blocked all titles with the tags "EA" and "EA Play" on Steam. Never have to worry about it.

Apparently the "easy" in EAC means easy like when you call a woman easy...

Hahahaha fuck them enabling customers.

There's a super interesting video by PirateSoftware on YouTube about this too.