EA’s Easy Anti-Cheat Software Suspends Apex Legends Tournament

From a gaming studio’s perspective, anti-cheat software is a must if you have multiplayer games in your catalog. Some people will deliberately play those multiplayer titles just to cause a stir among people who either want to have fun or team up with their buddies to win. One of the great examples of a working anti-cheat software can be seen by Activision, who push constant updates to ridicule cheaters to ruin the reputation of their games.

As much as we would like to see the same enthusiasm from other companies like Valve and EA, they seem to always forget about the quality of their product when it comes to protecting them from malicious acts from cheaters. While Valve is trying to fix the bot issues on Team Fortress 2 and still cannot counter cheaters in Counter-Strike 2, a new wave of breaches was found in the EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat), the software that many of the Electronic Arts games use to keep their multiplayer titles under control.

We would like to use under-control a bit loosely, as recently, the North American Apex Legends tournament was halted due to one of the members of a high-ranking team’s account being hacked. During the match, a sudden window appears on the player's screen, and suddenly, everyone on the map is visible with wallhacks. You might think the cheats were added by the tournament-goer, but in the recorded clips of the incident, the name “Destroyer2009” shows up in the chatbox, who is known as a cheater in the Apex Legends community.

Many believe that Electronic Art’s Easy Anti-Cheat software is flawed after the incident, any game that uses the anti-cheat software could be easily hacked by the looks of it. Although the recent update from Electronic Arts denies such a coincidence occurring, we still advise you to stay away from Electronic Arts titles, especially Apex Legends, for a while. Single-player games might not be affected, but just to be safe, it is best to give a break for the single-player games that also use Easy Anti-Cheat.

It seems like there is no middle ground when it comes to accompanying players with anti-cheat software. While making the software integrated into the game engine, it could cause problems for the legit players, and letting people download external cheating software might have alternative issues, such as slowing the computers down or maybe even leading to stealing data without permission. In short, we have passed the days when people could just boot up their games and enjoy whatever was available to them without being disturbed.