Destroyer2009 has spoken out.
Destroyer2009 has allegedly revealed his reasons for his huge Apex hack over the weekend. In an interview with Techcrunch, the mysterious hacker has spoken out.
Of course, all of his claims should be treated with scepticism, but this is the only information we have directly from Destroyer2009 himself.
"Just for fun" is Destroyer2009's motivation
One of the biggest questions when someone performs an act like this, is why? What do you gain from committing a crime and disrupting an event like this. Does the perpetrator want to make a point to EA? Are they against the players they chose to target?
But, in this interview Destroyer2009 claims his motivations were simply to do this "just for fun" and to force Apex developers to fix the vulnerability he exploited. Critics would say you could point out this vulnerability in a much less disruptive and destructive way.
Was Hal and Genburten's PC directly accessed?
One of the hottest topics of discussion has been if the machines of ImperialHal and Genburten have been directly accessed by the hacker. This matters because it explains in part how serious the issue is. Does the weakness lie with the game, or did those pros have their computers infected? For the general playerbase, this is the single most important thing to establish.
Yesterday, it emerged that ImperialHal did have a direct connection to his PC from a known malicious server. From this, you can extrapolate this was probably the source of the issue for him.
However, Destroyer2009 is claiming he did not directly access these machines. The hacks "never went outside the game", according to the Techcrunch interview.
Now of course, the hacker could easily be lying. They will be attempting to throw people off, cover their tracks and prevent prosecution being taken against them. The only way we will know for sure is if EA/Respawn ever put out an official clarification on what the vulnerability was.
Could Destroyer2009 have done more?
One of the other claims made in this interview is that Destroyer2009 could have done a lot worse. They claim they targeted those players because "they're just nice guys" but " not many people would have used an exploit like that in an absolutely innocent way for players."
They went on to say "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."
Once again, treat these comments with scepticism but if the hacker is to be believed, the implications of this Apex hack could have been even larger. We have seen Destroyer2009 gift packs and spawn players into lobbies, so what power they have is unknown.
Respawn have already started patching the vulnerability, and at least if this interview is to be believed, there should not be future attacks. It seems Destroyer2009 wants this fixed, and that will be the end of it.
However, they might still face legal action against them for this hack. With that in mind, these claims might be an attempt at mitigation.
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