Video — Professional Apex players hacked live

Respawn Entertainment has postponed the North American finals of its Apex Legends Global Series after at least two players reported being hacked during a match.

Genburton from Team DarkZero and ImperialHal from Team SoloMid were live-streaming their matches when they were attacked.

According to the two players, the attacker injected cheats into their game.

It later emerged that the interface for the cheats that briefly popped up on screen included a checkbox with the phrase “Vote Putin”.

Recordings of Genburton’s match seem to show how his game is hijacked and a wallhack enabled. Wallhacks let cheating players see through walls.

He can be seen taking his hands off his controls as his character continues to move on its own.

In ImperialHal’s case, the attacker seemed to install an aimbot — a cheat that automatically aims for players.

The attacker also sent a message as the compromised player via in-game chat stating, “Apex hacking global series by Destroyer2009 & R4ndom”.

In the early hours of Monday morning, the Anti-Cheat Police Department volunteer group reported that attackers had abused a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability to inject the cheat software into Apex Legends.

The group said it was unclear whether it was the game client or Epic Games’ Easy Anti-Cheat software that was vulnerable.

“Currently, the RCE is being abused to inject cheats into streamers machines, which means they have the capabilities to do whatever, like installing ransomware software locking up your entire PC,” they warned.

Respawn said it would release more information soon.

“Due to the competitive integrity of this series being compromised, we have made the decision to postpone the NA finals at this time,” it said via the Apex Legends Esports account on Twitter/X.

“We will share more information soon.”