Last weekend, the North American finals of the Apex Legends Global Series were abruptly canceled after two players were hacked to enable cheat software during the match. This was caused by a remote code execution (RCE) exploit, an intrusion so malicious that Easy Anti Cheat (used by Apex) refutes that their software has "no RCE vulnerabilities."

Easy Anti-Cheat was out of the gate before EA and Respawn, but the developer of Apex finally commented on the matter. Not saying much, though.

"On Sunday, the accounts of several professional players of Apex Legends were hacked during the ALGS event. The security of the game and our players is our top priority, which is why we suspended the tournament to address this issue immediately."

"Our team has introduced the first in a series of updates to protect the Apex Legends player community and provide a secure experience for everyone.

Well, that's all as clear as mud.

A quick recap of what happened is that DarkZero player Noyan "Genburten" Ozkose suddenly found himself using wallhacks in his third game of the day and could see all the other players. Ozkose feared that his team would be penalized, so he forfeited the match. In the next match, Philip "ImperialHal" Dorsen of TSM was unexpectedly and unintentionally equipped with an AIMBOT. The match was abandoned and the event was cancelled until further notice "because the competitive integrity of this series has been compromised."

The official Apex esports account re-posted Respawn's message, adding: "At this time we do not believe there will be any changes to the Split 1 Playoffs. We will provide more details on the Challenger Circuit and NA Regional Finals in the coming days. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you in advance for your patience."

EA and Respawn are cautious because of the RCE exploit, which allows attackers to basically do whatever they want on the victim's hardware. Rockstar was forced to quickly address a potential exploit in GTA Online last year, and the entire Dark Souls series lost its PvP servers for nine months in 2022.

Conversely, this is why Easy Anti-Cheat was so strong out of the gate against this hack. Having an RCE exploit in a game is one thing, but if EAC is a vector, then every other game where EAC is used could be a target (Fortnite and Eldenring, among others).

EA, publisher of Apex Legends, has yet to comment on the attack. I have reached out to both EA and Respawn for comment and will update if I hear back.