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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 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

88 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."

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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

No but the game code does. And that game code also interacts with EAC. You can argue it's a bug in Apex Legends, and it would be that too, but the fact is that EAC shouldn't be executing arbitrary commands based on what the game code has given it, so if that possibility exists in EAC, it is still an RCE in Apex Legends and a kernel privilege escalation flaw in EAC.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

It’s very likely not EAC that’s the problem. Best guess is the hacker has some kind of server side access, be it allowing unsigned/unauthorized operations to be executed from a client or having access to the servers themselves via rce

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

So what's going on? These players all had cheats loaded and this is the excuse they came up with when it was detected on their systems? Cheats are pretty rampant, but they've mostly shifted to people using external hardware like XIM or Chronos to bypass cheat detection and abuse the Aim Assist function. It's blatantly obvious in competitive games, especially first-person shooters. Ah well, get gud kid. Learn how to aim.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

In another thread for this, someone posted links to streams of the players when it happens. They immediately notice and adjust their playstyle to avoid the cheat (one guy with wall hack leaves the game, another guy with aim bot stops shooting anything). It wasn't a case of "game detects cheating and player tries to explain after the fact", but "cheat suddenly and obviously enabled, player announces it immediately in voice chat and team advises to leave".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

Considering it's two high profile players, I'd say the most likely is that they were tricked into downloading something, or some other software they were using had an exploit (I've had one from a browser plugin before now). There's a video elsewhere in this thread of one of them downloading Malwarebytes for something, so maybe they didn't manage to get rid of whatever it was.

Other option is an exploit on the server. Maybe there's some way of sending malformed data to a player you're not currently in a game with to exploit an RCE. It's not completely impossible, but I figure we'd see it a lot more if that was the case.

I'd put money on option 1 though.