Apparently the "easy" in EAC means easy like when you call a woman easy...
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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It ain't easy being sleazy.
Hahahaha fuck them enabling customers.
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.
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.
- This isn't DRM, but an anti-cheat
- The game is free, there's nothing to oirste
- The developer has announced that it's not the anticheat's fault after all, but a remote execution vulnerability in the game itself
There's a super interesting video by PirateSoftware on YouTube about this too.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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