ALGS hacker claims he just wanted Respawn to fix an exploit—and to have fun

After widespread concern following the Apex Legends Global Series hacking scandal, Destroyer2009 allegedly stepped forward and explained why he decided to pull off the stunt.

On March 17, Respawn Entertainment was forced to postpone the ALGS North American Regional Final after TSM’s ImperialHal and DarkZero’s Genburten had their accounts hacked into and filled with game-breaking cheats. The source of the hacking incident was all but confirmed to be a hacker called Destroyer2009 according to messages typed into Genburten’s game chat. In an interview with TechCrunch, Destroyer2009 confirmed he did it “just for fun” and wanted to make the devs fix the exploit he used to access the pros’ accounts, but did not reveal how he was able to pull off the feat.

“I really don’t want to go into the details until everything is fully patched and everything goes back to normal,” Destroy2009 said, and he also claimed the hack “has nothing to do with the server and I’ve never touched anything outside of the Apex process.”

In defense of the hacking incident, Destroy2009 argued it could have been worse if someone else had abused the exploit instead. “Just imagine if it wasn’t a joke and we didn’t put any memes in the cheat, I’m pretty sure you can ruin someone’s career if they had a cheat pop up on a tournament,” the hacker said. 

In response to the incident, the Apex Legends devs responded to the scandal by admitting “a few accounts were hacked during an ALGS event.” The devs followed the admission up by assuring the Apex community there are already protections against such an exploit being used again put in place, with more on the way.

Apex Legends anti-cheat system Easy Anti-Cheat also attempted to reassure fans by confirming there was an investigation and the team was “confident that there is no RCE vulnerability within EAC being exploited.”