So I have been quite vocal about my feelings on the Apex Legends title and where it has gone over the years, and whilst I'll never confess to being that much of a fan- I can appreciate the pretty solid Star Wars Jedi franchise we've been able to enjoy on the back of Apex's success. Few Live Services can boast a net positive like that, Apex might just be the only one. That being said, I do acknowledge that despite my feelings, Apex is not so small and insignificant a game in wider gaming culture, in fact it is one of the primary E-Sports hosters of the modern day. And it is in their capacity as an E-Sports vehicle that I bring their name and energy into my mouth and person once again because yes, Apex has postponed their NA tournament during the proceedings. And that is absolutely worth talking about for the way it connects to something we talked about a long time ago with the Apex package.
Firstly, I haven't watched an E-Sports tournament to completion in- probably my entire life, truth be told. (I watched a lot of the For Honor one when that debuted, but it was depressing to see people that much better than me be destroyed by even more skilled players- so I stopped.) For that reason I was quite surprised to see that Apex tournaments do not take place in a closed 'Tournament lobby' like one would expect for any other game. That is because, quite interestingly, Apex tournaments are competitive- but not strictly confrontative. That is to say, being a Battle Royale it would be unreasonable to expect any tournament to fill out an entire lobby full of E-Sports teams and just let them duke it out- so instead the final qualifying teams are placed through a series of online matches together wherein each team dukes it out to earn points until they reach a certain 'winner' threshold. I assume somewhere in this chain was what led to the events of the recent tournament.
To keep things to their essentials, as I cannot claim to be an expert enough on the topic to go into specifics, a rando in the lobby was equipped with hacks. Game cheats. You've heard of it a hundred times, no big shock. But what happened for Apex was so much worse. You see- this user was actually able to inject code into others present in the match and load their hacks onto their accounts- which he demonstrated on a few of the competing players, forcing them to exit out of the match and call the tournament to a pause. This hacker, who judging from his username was probably a 15 year old kid, loaded wall hacks and auto aim onto professional E-sports players' machines entirely remotely through the level of access that Apex provides. How is that even possible?
It actually reminds me of the days back in Grand Theft Auto 5 wherein players would be often met by flying hackers that would dump millions of ill-gotten gains into your wallet, prompting your account to be flagged for fraudulent activity by Rockstar. (Who cared because they sold that fake money with microtransaction brought by real money. So cheating that in was like cheating them out of a quick buck.) Luckily for the players they were present enough to loudly announce what was happening and get themselves out of the game, but that could have led to some very awkward confrontations if someone was gifted a hack they somehow didn't notice until after the round had ended. (Of course, in that instance it would be extremely questionable how a reputable pro couldn't notice the game playing even the slightest bit differently- it would be a Catch-22 at that point.)
Now, this actually goes a little bit deeper. The two who were hacked performed fullscans of their computers and came back with Trojans linked sourced directly from the Apex Client, and there are rumours that everyone else in the lobby received those virus' too. (Though I've yet to see that definitely concerned in the mad scramble around the situation.) The only remedy is to perform a full reinstall of Windows which, from somehow who knows a bit about that recently, is pretty much the nuclear option just shy of throwing away the entire computer and getting a new one. Seriously, you have to reinstall everything, all drives, programs, apps- it's just about the biggest headache a user can willingly impart on themselves.
That is all possible because of a vulnerability that was highlighted years ago, that even I spotlighted on my blog of the game- the Kernal Level access that Apex's anti-cheat software demands from your system. Access to the very route files of your computer system, meaning that in an instance where a developer gets lazy after years of support, or perhaps simply can't keep up the same support because their parent company has fired entire chunks of the staff, failures in server safety can threaten the most valuable innards of your system. By installing these anti-cheats you are burrowing a hole to the centre of your computer system and waiting for someone to come poking through the mysterious new hole- and now we've seen the consequences of that play out live on a grand stage for millions to see.
Apex has been developing a reputation for hackers of late, but now everyone is aware of just how dangerous of a problem it is- the viability of tournaments have really been thrown into question. If any lobby rando can sneak code to take hostage of a pro's system, potentially even go so far as to siphon their details while they play and use that to hack them- a very real possibility given the spotlight these players get put under during these competitions- one has to wonder if the current Apex scene is worth the very real risk one could put themselves under. That is why this is more than just a delay to the tournament, it's a full scale pause as everyone tries to figure out what the heck they can do in the face of what the world has belatedly woken up to.
So after years of literally being written off as fearmongers, those wary of Apex anti-cheat have finally be vindicated, and now the eye must turn to other games with similarly invasive anti-cheat measures and the potential vulnerabilities that they can present. A horrendously badly timed article from 'Pushtotalk' this Feburary entitled 'Gamers Don't Understand Anti Cheat' actually framed this exact fear of Kernel level Anticheats under the simply delirious strawman that "Developers aren't trying to steal your data, dumb dumb!" As though anyone was seriously worried that bloody EA was trying to hack into our system, that was never the concern! This was the concern! And those wiping their hands of online competitive games thinking themselves safe be warned- Helldivers 2 has Kernal Level Anti-cheat access!
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