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The clips of the hacks being installed/activated are pretty crazy:
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.
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!”
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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:
‘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.
Under linux EAC runs as your normal user, so it can't install system-wide malware but it can read/write your personal data. If you create a dedicated user for gaming you should be safe from this kind of stuff.
“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.
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.
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.
An EAC RCE 0-day would be worth a lot of money to nation states or organized crime.
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
This clip is him installing Malwarebytes, after the hacking/cheating incident happened
There's something deeply worrying about the fact that especially here on Lemmy people are so acutely aware of the audience they're speaking to that we need to preface our messages with "I'm really on your side on this issue BUT.." because we know how easy it is to say the wrong thing and then be mobbed for it.
One shouldn't have to worry about any of that. Especially on anonymous internet forum. If someone comes at you for posting a twitter link then that's their issue, not yours.
By number of users, Lemmy is the worst forum for mobbing I've ever come across. You'd get similar mobbing on Reddit but there were 500x the number of users.
I assume it's because a mass of people came here for a staunchly idealistic reason simply because it was the alternative to reddit.
Also that the people who don't care about that kind of thing wouldn't have bothered moving from Reddit in the first place, or be bothered enough to interact with the post.
I mean, I despise Twitter myself and wish I didn't drive traffic to their website, but this clip is just too good not to share.
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?
There isn't much sandboxing in Wine, but at least on linux, the AC is forced to run in userspace (instead of having root privileges). So it's not quite as invasive, but it still has access to everything your non-root account has access to. Which is still a lot. Probably not much better from a privacy perspective, but at least a little better from a security perspective.
The latter
Doesn't the compatibility layer mean its restricted to its own wine prefix? Or am I misunderstanding?
In theory. However, wine was not designed as a security sandbox, and it might be possible (or even trivial) for something to intentionally break out of it. This gets more likely when considering the growing market share of linux.
Wait who TF is cheating in HD? It's pve?
You would be surprised who will cheat. Watch Karl Jobst and some of the cheaters he has made vids on
Some people might still want to be seen as the bestest Helldiver evar.
Hacking aside it is funny to me that the anti-cheat made it possible to enable cheats.
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.
There is an RCE exploit in EAC which has been confirmed by their twitter account; but they didn't confirm of it being exploited anywhere.
My belief is that the people responsible into it hacked these people months ago; as a few months ago the same hacker did attack ImperialHal while on stream with botted zombie accounts that follow him to kill him. On that stream's highlights all those bots were named (number)destroyer2009fan; which is the same as the person that spammed the chat at the time of the hack.
This is not an advertisement for cheats. Searching the hacker's name in cheat forums doesn't point to any specific program. I suspect that this is openly calling out Respawn to fix their anticheat, which has been a laughing stock.
There is an RCE exploit in EAC which has been confirmed by their twitter account
really? because all I've seen was them saying the exact opposite: https://twitter.com/TeddyEAC/status/1769725032047972566
The tweet says they've seen the reports of a potential RCE, if they acknowledge this that pretty much means there is something that could achieve it. (or am i reading into it incorrectly?)
But they also state that this hasn't been exploited.
Afaik nothing has been confirmed besides that tweet from EAC
Mmmm I’ve not done any digging, but the likelihood of a large number of streamers all using cheating software and a large number of them literally announcing it and leaving the game is quite slim.
Think of it this way, assuming they were cheating, the streamers would not want to get caught right? So they would be using cheats that aren’t being broadcast over their streaming software. To then announce “oh no I’m cheating” and quit would be silly, what would be the point of this even joining the tournament at that point? On the other hand, if the cheats were visible on their streams… that seems like a glaring issue a streamer wouldn’t make, never mind a large number of them.
I think their hypothesis is that the streamers had installed and used cheats outside of the tournament and that the cheat suppliers enabled them remotely to advertise on the big stream.
They probably didn't randomly guess what happened. There would be pretty obvious clues as to how it happened. The network traffic for tournaments like this is monitored. Because they have to be done online. If they had no idea what actually happened, they would have at least been suspicious of the players at first. No matter what messages were playing in chat at the time.
This isn't a statement from Apex or EAC. The original source for the RCE claim is the "Anti-Cheat Police Department" which appears to just be a twitter community. There is absolutely no way Apex would turn over network traffic logs to a twitter community, who knows what kind of sensitive information could be in that. At best, ACPD is taking the players at their word that the cheats magically showed up on their computers.
PS. Apparently there have been multiple RCE vulnerabilities in the Source Engine over the years. So, I’m keeping my mind open.
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.