The Thor dude seems like a super legit genuine dude. The advice he gives, in general, but more so at the end of this video, is incredibly authentic. I wish there were more folks in this world like that. Good shit man.
Thor's stream and videos are exceptional. He speaks really well and is always encouraging and welcoming. Such a great twitch streamer to have on and just listen along.
Dude you have no idea hes legitimately invested in helping people stop working for the man and make shit on their own, hes going to get killed by the CIA or some shady conspiracy shit like that if he doesnt stop :p
I really appreciate Thor for his gentle pushback against Mande when he was repeating sensationalized claims (out of understandable fear), pushing against it and nudging Mande into the right direction and saying your piece without needing to call out any specific thing they said or saying anything too confrontational. I also kind of love that it almost became a mini therapy session for Mande for a while towards the back half lmao.
Yeah, it's really sad that for him, Apex is a paycheck instead of a game he can enjoy. You've built your career/life around playing this game that you have no control or say over, and it was an extremely dangerous investment which paid off for years, but now realizing that Apex was never going to be around forever. He should've pivoted his content much earlier, but now he has to do it when no other FPS games are kind of competing for the space.
@@steamfeuvermakes me hope for the finals to pick up traction at some point. i understand the grievances, and the cheating problem is unfortunately bad, but the developers have very real care for this game and show fully that they want to make something all players can enjoy playing a game and supporting a studio like that is really a nice breath of fresh air compared to trying to cater to a mega corporate game where you are just a number and the game is strictly a paycheck
@@mav9987I agree, in this day in age it’s smart to always have a pivot game. These games aren’t conventional sports and don’t have the stability of them either. It’s also hard to predict which games have true long term potential (ie. factors like dev, company, or gameplay issues). I enjoyed The Finals for the first few weeks of beta and launch but soon after the game felt a little repetitive. Although the game is extremely dynamic, it also feels monotonous at the same time. Maybe more unique maps, or gameplay loops would help improve it but who knows.
@@jyk8991 needs way more modes. i compare it to overwatch more than i do apex, and what keeps overwatch fresh is its plethora of maps and modes. once they get them going down we can really see people sticking to the game in full
Thor - Top tier security specialist, years of experience, many notable achievements, former wielder of the mighty banhammer! Prime: - Massive security liability, damn near wiped out Netflix on an oopsie......
About the serverside exploitation section: The code for the things happening in this clip, exist within the game files. 1) Spawning bots. There was a limited time mode for Halloween where you could get two AI companions (Prowlers) which acted autonomously with a simple AI to chase and melee enemies within a certain range of you. 2) Increased squad size. There was a limited time mode, in which SURVIVORS killed by HUNTERS switched sides to HUNTERS, enabling teams of dozens on the HUNTER side. The Hackers just need a way to activate combinations of existing legacy functions in the game.
Very good point. Just because none of the buttons in the game assemble a packet to spawn bots anymore does not mean that nobody could assemble one by hand/ with a program. If both of those features are left in, no RCE'd be necessary.
So, pretty much the hacker can use whatever asset the devs have left in the files and create whatever he wants so long as they have existed in said files while making a few adjustments here and there. Apex is his sandbox.
But also, the hacker needed to gather all these bots in the same lobby with his target player, and the game treats these bots as players, which means that the hacker had to use a matchmaking system to get them into the same match with the target player. Doesn't this make it logical to assume that this is a server hack, with some kind of "admin permissions"? It's very similar to what cheaters do in gta online and rdr2 imho
This reminds me of Smash Ultimate hackers loading singleplayer boss battle arenas to play normal Vs. online matches. The server and other clients simply didn't validate that the stage ID being requested was actually selectable for Vs, that's all. With access to the server RCON, debug commands used by the developers to test server functionality prior to events becomes possible. Commands that may explicitly be designed to allow stuff to be tested out of context, without engaging the game mode they were intended for. The same kind of command used by the original server administrators for all kinds of things, including, but not limited to, banning and unbanning players.
Yeah I thought the same thing. He didn't say "something is wrong." He immediately recognized it as a hack. Not a possible glitch or even a thought that it could be. This makes me believe that person is familiar with the cheat interface at the very least. The wording of that call out could be a Freudian slip.
@@fivetriplezero8985 I'd say anybody who spends a significant amount of time in FPS games, especially at higher levels where they have a lot more knowledge, they know what that stuff looks like. Like, I pretty regularly see clips of cheaters being exposed or stuff like that, it's not all that uncommon. Plus, it's pretty obvious it's a cheat even from a glance. Suddenly you don't have control of your mouse and it's just lasering down people, and you can see them through the wall? It takes half a second of reasoning to understand what's happening.
@@fivetriplezero8985 Being high level players in a game that has people that generally cheat sometimes in lobbies, I’m sure they’d be able to recognize an aimbot right away. I probably would and I’m a diamond scrub
I work in the cybersecurity industry and also live in the Seattle area. Love your channel, your mission (from my own perspective), someone that actually understands red/purple/blue teams and the role they play in an organization, and how software and application development is deployed and the issues that arise when CI/CD and QA processes are weak with no culture around collaboration across team functions. You get it. You’re a pro. And your opinions and expertise shared on this channel has impacts across the gaming industry. Keep up the amazing work! The gaming community needs more like you to speak up!
Id usually laugh at the sentence "I'm a hacker" but your experience and ability to speak effectively and confidently really help ring home how that honestly an understatement
@@twostonedactual2541 I dont have the best skills, but i rec just double checking if you feel sketch about something. I always just do a small search about files or sites before anything
@@twostonedactual2541even if you’re not a PC gamer, the knowledge that you can use to protect your identity and data is priceless. Everyone should be made aware of security.
This is such a fascinating conversation. Having a cyber security expert, in the gaming space, while a major network breach happens, in the middle of a massive esports tournament is such a rare occurrence. I’ll definitely be following closely.
Man, this video is blowing up! Mad props for the work and knowledge that goes behind this, you're doing the lords work by getting this stuff the exposure it deserves. I've never made a tip before on RUclips but your shorts always pop up in my feed and your advice has genuinely had a positive impact on both my work and personal life. Figured this is a way I could return the favor, thank you for everything you do.
Thor, after over a decade of working in an ICT Support/SysAdmin role and not feeling great progression, I'm part of site wide lay off but this allows me to upskill... Watching your videos and streams over the past year and seeing your passion for what you do and did in the past, inspired me into pursuing my interests/instincts in security and analytics. I absolutely love it! Thank you for the always informative and enjoyable content, I think I speak for the majority by saying that you're very much an inspiration to to many!
It's incredibly refreshing to hear someone advocating for compassion while not invalidating the anger the community feels. Wish I could catch your streams, but I'm happy to have found your YT content.
I love thor and i love thors ability to be like we shouldnt be claiming we know we dont and also when given new info "oh this changes things". To many people are scared to admit either of those things.
"The marketing and merchandising teams are going to keep going even if the game is on fire because that was there release schedule. Not every team stops just because one aspect of the game is broken" THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SAYING THIS. Coming from the Halo Infinite team it was so tiring seeing every single external media post get flooded with comments like "Why are you releasing a new audiobook?! FIX THE GAME!!!. Why are you releasing a fun little cookbook?? FIX THE GAME!!! Why are you putting more cosmetics on the store!!!? FIX THE GAME!!!!" My brother, it's not the art team's job to fix the game, or the marketing, or franchise, or legal's team to fix the game. It's QA and engineers and every time they come into work it's like opening the door to a furnace. And yes absolutely, imagine how hard it is to solve these massively entangled issues ON TOP of the community hating your guts and giving you negative morale all day every day for even mundane things, let alone serious issues. You want stuff to get fixed? Honest to god, just submit a support ticket and be as unbiased and objective with your description as possible. QA needs plain facts and raw information to work with. The more of that they have the better they can prioritize and fix things. No matter how angry you get or how betrayed you feel or how crap the game seems to be at the end of the day its really just that simple. Twitter rage doesn't fix those kinds of problems. Basic support tickets do.
The servers of Respawn being vulnerable is a story as old as the company. They literally stopped selling Titanfall 1 because its servers are/were trashed by apparently a single hacker. And the Titanfall 2 community kept their game alive by modding the game and adding a custom server browser and custom gamemodes for the game back when the same hackers were attacking the Titanfall 2 servers. Now TF|2 is playable again on vanilla servers but who knows how long that will last.
That's what I find so weird about this Apex's server compromission. 4 months after TF|2 servers are patch it's the Apex servers that are underfire. Imagine if the hacker would find a way to automate waves of bots to render the game unplayable like he automated server crash in TF|2 ?
This is the scariest part. It's EA and Respawn's negligence or ignorance of fixing their games from hackers. It goes to show that modders from the community have more control over the game than the people who created them. It's pretty much up to Respawn and EA to figure out if they want to make an effort to care for the breadwinner or simply craft another one and hope it does well financially.
The fact they still use stryder baffles me. Despite how many times it has shown how its old age is effecting it, they still decide thats its perfectly safe. They just need to fix stryder or take it down.
@@Sorrowgrave No thats wrong there was a group that "tried" to combat the "hacker" which they then turned evil to hack tf2 just flooding servers with bots and then did the same with apex and changed the msg of the day to their groups name and they boasted it was all easy cause respawn used the same security layout for all three games all while EA was selling tf1/2 at discount while fully knowing no one could play any of the games for years and apex being down for like 2 days at the same time.
Your knowledge is unmatched and your natural intuition and experience is beyond commendable and I have learned so much from watching you, Thor. You are incredible. Thank you.
has experience spoke volumes in his his dialogue with Mande. kept to 100 with him while validating feelings. i can tell ones things for sure. Thor is an amazing boss.
“The aimbot is not to far off from his normal skills” as Thor is paused on a frame where in the bottom right he also hit for 40 shield and 72 flesh, while the ads is not even on those people 😂
I'd just like to say thank you for listening to Mande's complaints and responding in the way that you did. While I don't know the guy that well it felt like you got through to him pretty well and helped him to sort some things out in his head and get some things off his chest. I feel too much that people have an Us V Them mentality when it comes to defending people in their industry and the fact that you were able to make Mande feel heard and understood while showing him how it all works, why he feels that way, and have him come out of the conversation understanding the other side while still feeling his grievances were valid was a wonderful thing. I sincerely hope more developers and community managers take note of that, as I reckon it'd help make discourse around these sorts of issues calmer and more constructive.
Mande is a pretty chill guy, he never is a negative type but he’s been dealing with cheating for MONTHS to the point where some days he had to stop playing sadly because it was every game, and he is tired of respawn not doing anything ( it feels like they arnt ) but yea it’s nice he listens to Mande and also gives him some intel on the employee side of things was a cool call tbh
Super super good conversation. Never listened to long form pirate software before. What a lovely guy breaking down a complex topic in a really good and considerate way towards the players and the company
And to think not that long ago I remember thinking “who’s private software and why is he in my TikTok and shorts so much?” Now when this happened I thought “I wonder what pirate will say.” Love it
So rad to finally have an entertaining, prominent voice in the streaming space that can react to things like this with an informed perspective (and inform viewers in the process). So much stuff to digest here, and yet super easy to follow 🙏
Fr my number one pet peeve of react youtubers is when they are so uninformed yet try to make these big elaborate deductions or statements on something when they have no idea what they’re talking about.
Some lore on Destroyer2009 Destroyer is a kid who got hardware banned on rust like 5 years ago which sent him down a coding/exploiting rabbit hole. He is a fan of apex who has been developing cheats and finding vulnerabilities in the game for a long time. This level of breach is impressive and I’m curious to know what level of access to the server and or client he really has
@@mr.jojomunoz6561 He's just relaying what he heard on Mande's second video with destroyer, doesn't look like many people have seen that video an I advise checking it out lol Another thing destroyer mentioned was having 200 accounts in queue trying to get into the game, so everyone thinking he's "spawning bots through code" are off the mark xD
Imagine being such a Gigachad in cybersecurity industry and be like: "Nah, my passion is making games and petting ferrets". Like those Ultimate Samurai with unmatched sword skills who become farmers just for a peace of mind
On the topic of communication and devs, I haven't played the game in a long while but I will always respect the team at Warframe for how they are able to take one of the biggest spaghetti messes of a videogame and cultivate a relatively positive relationship with the community. The devs are playing and talking in game to people, they're doing livestreams where they directly talk about things rather than avoiding them, they'll say "hey, guess what, that plan we had - you all tweeted us telling us it sucked and you hated it, so we recognise it's a mistake and we're not going to do it", and then they lighten the mood with some memes and human interactions and positivity. Rebecca and Megan from the community team and some of the devs like Pablo who just literally sit on a sofa once a month or tweet reply to people do more than any crafted PR statement or new shiny distraction could ever do to get players on side.
again take this with a grain of salt because I haven't been close to the game for a while, but my last understanding was that Megan was community manager and Rebecca was her boss and one of the directors@@MonlopoMAN
I love them bringing in the apex player because it shows both sides on how people are approaching this information. You have the InfoSec/Dev side and the average end user side.
@@tylermorrison509 he didn't have all the information. He made conclusions based on what he knew at the time. While he doesn't know apex, he then had someone who does join him so he could discuss and rethink with new information
@@tylermorrison509 Considering it's been his job for 20 years, and he was following the process of elimination (basic problem solving, doesn't require his job or training)- you sound dense.
the weird thing about the whole situation to me is: some days prior to this these players got gifted A LOT of lootboxes (like 10k usd worth or something like it) while livestreaming. It could be possible that these hackers found a way to connect and execute code on the player's clients, but had no way of telling which client was which player. They started gifting those Apex Packs to those who were livestreaming to sort of "connect the dots" and find out which "client ID" was which player. This is just my theory, could also be anything else as Im not an expert, but seems weird to me that those 2 players BOTH received these packs gifted to them merely days prior to this competition.
@@Kaimax61wouldnt it be more beneficial to post it NOT unlisted to get more views? I never heard of him before this. Irregardless tho he posted this at 4am my time when i was getting ready to sleep so i didnt even notice
Thanks for posting this Thor. I was checking in about this since someone else was asking about it and you were the first person that I figured would have the best grasp of the situation [outside the company]. I was not disappointed with the discussion. Great insights on the internal workings within a large company. Keep up the great work.
It seems like the majority of my comments are getting censored on this stoopid website! Anyway, I'm sorry for that... Look at the last option inside the "TSM HALAL HOOK" window. I can't repeat these word here, apparently... I think it might give us a tiny bit of information about the hacker's physical location, or at least from what kind of demographic he is from. edit: That's assuming that cheat tool was made by this/these individual(s), which might not be the case.
Everything else aside, I think its really awesome how you could, and did, give Mande some peace of mind, great overall advice etc. Ofc you do it for your viewers a lot, which is what I greatly respect, but the guy is sounds so clearly relieved after he could vent a bit and had some of his worries put to rest
im so glad you uploaded this whole thing, man so many people heard you say "I think his machine is compromised" in the first few minutes- punched it in as a headline and clipped it, and now people think Apex is 100% good and these two just have malware... (WE dON'T KNOW YET).
Man it's really cool that talking about anti-cheat is becoming more mainstream now! As a bonus most anti-cheat devs are huge nerds and truly love thier craft. It's very fun to listen to and when the person talking knows WAAAAY more than the normal player real things can happen. Knowledge is power, and is the players have more knowledge then that can help everyone!
I really hope Thor sees this, not that I expect that he will. The part at 1:24:25 where he sympathises with the Devs, The devs are doing as much as they can. It’s EA, the publisher that bought the game studio that makes apex, Respawn Entertainment, that are too greedy to employ a proper team and implement necessary systems. The game has generated $bns and EA is definitely capable of employing the adequate number of protection staff for this They just dont fucking care
He is right on that one. - Even if the leasdership doesnt do S___ about this, the devs probably would - if they were let, and not busy with "important" other work. Most companies just shove you into several projects at once, and you just try to manage every single one of those with the time you have. If they dont allow you to work on this, you just dont. So yeah, hating devs is never a good solution. You can definitely argue about the leadership though.
Sadly, he knows. He knows EA are just as terrible as Blizzard, but he's giving faith that Respawn can still find a solution to combat the situation. Hopefully third time is the charm and Respawn can finally their breadwinner from getting demolished by hackers.
You’re talking out of your arse. Yes we all know EA sucks but if a game has exploits it’s the game devs fault, not ea. it feels like you don’t know how the business work. EA bought respawn game releases under their brand. They have zero to do with the game in it self and let’s all companies under brand develop their games as they wish. Only thing EA cares about is looking at papers seeing profits
Thanks for posting this Thor. I was checking in about this since someone else was asking about it and you were the first person that I figured would have the best grasp of the situation!!
also two reasons as to why valorant are not as cheater infested is cause you have their fog of war system that doesnt give full information to your client AND it is a 5v5 game so say that 10% of players are cheating, that means in any given game the probability that you have 1 cheater is statistically "avrage". while in BR games that avrage increases with the amount of players in said game.
As a college student in cyber security these things are always interesting and I love the discussion. I always feel like I'm learning more, especially when it comes to the analysis of the issue. Greatly appreciated
As someone who does security, this is exactly what it looks like (PirateSoftware's handling) - you verify every claim, using all the evidence. He drew out the information from the subject matter experts with perfect questions, building out connections where possible. Trying not to make them certain where they're not. Assumptions will kill you as badly as grumpy employees and phishing attacks will. There is a LOT to learn from watching this.
Love how 30 secs into this hour and a half vid you made it so clear as of who you are. I love you men! Congrats on that Steam Award, been watching you since then. Can't believe I spent most of my time on YT and Twitch without watching you.
@@Joeyfield0 He's the other dude talking to Thor at the beginning/rest of the video sporadically. The other guy who joins midway is some apex player judging by what he's saying about the game.
@@Joeyfield0 as Pixelbendr said. To add context, he is a developer at netflix with a large community on youtube twitch and overall super funny and smart guy. The other guy joining is TSM Mande, but he had a lot of success filling in for apex pros, and this season he was also competing in ALGS with his semi-seriouss team of streamers.
So glad this guy seems to know what he is talking about. So much reactionary content regarding this and people re-formatting (after a quick how do i re format search) their pc.
@@magnum3.14 When using a new data drive, you have to format it(im not savvy enough to know exactly what formatting does, but it basically allocates space in the drive for the computers to use). Re-formatting means youre completely wiping all data on that drive by allocating that space again. Wiping a drive means there is a high chance of wiping any virusses lodged in it. Wont work on hardware virusses unfortunately but these are extremely rare.
Watched this from Mandes stream yesterday and you blew my mind. Instantly subbed and liked when I saw this pop up on my feed. Thank you for your knowledge and insight!!
1:07:44 "You cannot support a place, an say they're awful, and also keep on going to them, cuz that's a toxic relationship". So what ? We buy a game, and we should stop saying that devs are lazy and don't do anything ? We should stop playing games because we're gonna be screwed at some point by this repetitive situation ? And should we stop using computers too ? People want to consume things. There is a world of wonders around them, and they should just shut up or leave because that's "toxic" to keep going on using a software or a computer or a game they love ? Wtf is that ?? That's reversing the responsability. I don't buy the "devs do what they can, you have to believe it" : if they were that interested in solving the phenomenon of cheating, firstable they would REQUIRE PHONE NUMBERS for everybody so in case that a cheater is caught, it can't come back years later, then secondly they would develop an anti-cheat SERVER-SIDE. Like monitoring the speed of players, their aim, etc. That's not easy for some parameters but that should be doable, and most of all : bullet-proof, because hackers could do nothing with no hands on the server. All cheating sofwtare would die instantly. Also, they should provide players a way to RECORD in-game what they see, and to gather groups of reviewers that can review clips and assign a degree of "heat" based on what they see, then by an algorithmic process a ban or at least a quarantine could be triggered after a certain heat was reached. Punkbuster did use human intervention back in 2003 for Wolfenstein Enemy Territory : screenshots were automatically made and sent to a database, and people on forums could review those screenshots and "detects" if they were seeing strange things. That's called "intelligence", and that's what is missing in development since twenty years. So people are pissed off to see such a lack of imagination and dedication to what they pay for.
I was so glad to hear you talk about the dev side of things. As a dev myself, it's so sad to see how bad people bash the devs. I can guarantee there are some devs at Respawn that truly hate to see the game in this state, and would love nothing more than to fix it. But unfortunately, they're under EA. If the big boss says "new legend first, bug fixes later", then you have to do it. You can't go rogue or your job is toast and you can't feed your family. It really sucks but at the end of the day that's the reality of it. I also agree that more companies need much better community relations. For EA, I can probably guess it's about money. They won't dare admit fault or their stock prices tank. At the end of the day, we have to speak with our wallets. Which also sucks because as stated in the video, many people may not encounter the same issues as Mande. In my 3 years of playing Apex, I have personally ran into maybe 1 cheater long ago. So yeah just an unfortunate situation all around.
Yes and no, respawn (the apex devs) have had this problem on almost every game they’ve made, while you’re right what the big boss says goes, you’d think after the 3rd game failing because of hackers you’d have a better plan going into it, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, is this any different?
It's hard not to feel antagonistic towards developers when the game keeps getting worse and worse and seemingly all they do is ask 200 euros for a knife.
@DoktorJammified tbf it isn't respawn that sets the prices its ea. Ea says how much money the need/want to make in set amount of time and respawn has to do it or say bye bye to funding and anything else ea provides for respawn
you approach these conversations with such empathy when speaking to players. I wish more game companies would communicate with the player base in the ways discussed in this video.
I deleted Apex a few years ago jow the cheaters were so common in both quick play & ranked, it just wasn't fun getting stomped by the crossmap aimbots and maphax making trying to even play smart pointless.
Thank you for cutting this out from your stream to make it easier to find/watch. I love this content but I would miss it as I don't get to watch every or the entire live streams so I am glad this was shared to get the info.
Guy's clearly in or around the community, so him spear phishing some prominent members to compromise their computers makes perfect sense to me. I assume most big streamers get stuff all the time that attempts to steal passwords, discord/youtube auth tokens etc, but people slip up all the time.
To be fair, a lot of streamers,pros,etc dont even know how to actually use a computer properly. Wich is kinda ironic considering their job depends on it.
Sure. Ill grant that. But none, and i mean none of that, in any capacity, would give the infiltrator server side access. Spawning hundreds of real time, live bots, in ranked games, top 500 lobvies, that the server sees as genuine players, just cannot be a client side exploit.
The easiest and most likely way is that destroyer is the developer for cheat engines that those players have downloaded. Spear phishing is incredibly hard to do to a streamer. I get the clip on this video shows how stupid they can be, but most streamers wouldn't fall for just any phishing scam, partially because they don't have a real business, and can easily recognize scam emails/messages due to the nature of their job. At a corporation a person could slip one through an overworked HR person or something like that but it scales up in hardness as the traffic through and size of the business scales down. Also it would be exceedingly hard to spear phish 3 people successfully in only a few months from the same community. The nature of the hacks being turned on also seems odd. Why wouldn't destroyer give each one the exact same cheats and display overlay/callouts? Maybe one of them really was compromised but the others just hit the wrong hot key? Or was destroyer just toggling them on in the state they already were to out those people for using them?
decoupling! Good in your code, bad in your videogame supercorporation. Why can't the PR team work with the security team and stuff? Answer is it's not built that way, it's a huge machine with tons of moving parts and modularity is harnessed to manage all that. But it's too extreme, I think the current concept of corporations is inherently flawed, especially the stock investment stuff is rotten these days. This is a messed up problem because it reminds you of the crap that is stinking up society and economy, but then it messes up the very videogames and content you use to get your mind off of that. I'm honestly glad I'm not at all involved with Apex Legends! (laughs in Nintendo Fan T-T)
Apex players be so thirsty for heirlooms istg. Also, I think he already did that. They talked about it in the video. You didn't expect to *keep* the heirlooms, did you? Respawn patched it and took everyone's items away.
@@NedInYaHead That wasn't Destroyer, lol. That was a whole separate issue that wasn't even related to cheating at all. It was a game bug that everyone was able to easily exploit to access all heirlooms without unlocking them.
thank you for clarifying the issues and not spreading miss information. it's refreshing to see someone who has a background on these issues and able to explain what's happening "in a simple way" and not jump to conclusions. Me being new here I'm definitely going to be watching more of your content that has to do with hacking since I find it fascinating and uneducated on the matter.
Respawn just seems to be a massive target for this and does not seem to have reacted to it well at all, and it's been constant for years in Apex and Titanfall. It's such a shame
I mean that like what to not do on the Internet 101, it's like the number one tennis player watching an amateur match where a guy fucks up the serve and breaks his arm in the process
hey Thor. Just wanted to thank you for informing us of the dangers between client side and server side stuff. The video was very enlightening of the situations both developers and players have to face. Know that I will be a part of the community that will see what other activities you want to branch out to as well. Thanks as always.
Even as a non-Apex Player, this video was extremely interesting! From the Support to the Game Devs, to bringing in Mande, this was all done very respectfully and was very helpful in understanding what goes on behind the scenes of ANY online game. Also, though I've never heard of him(as I don't play or follow Apex), Mande seems like an absolute stand-up guy!
In the server-side exploitation section, if Hal is playing on a compromised machine, they could redirect the matchmaking process of HIS game to connect to the hacker's server which would allow that zombie-bot behavior. Or it could simply be that they can join the same player's server, quickly filling it up with these bots of their own. Depends on the process to joining that server. In any case, it's an interesting video. Thanks!
These are Apex Predator lobbies with real players, and he is dropping 40 bots on them that count as one squad. If you continued watching you would've heard those bits.
As a consistent Apex Viewer in the comp scene and the general streamer community I really appreciate your words Thor. Mande is a good representative I think for the way most of the players feel. Without any recent word from Official Apex sources I will not have Apex content to watch and will choosing not to play Apex for the time being. Will be checking out the Pirate Software content instead since it seems to be made with a lot of thought, consideration, and really good quality audio.
I think the issue with Hideouts (the guy you tweet quoted) is not in this, it is in his total silence [before] and [after] this scenario. I remember the first time I ever saw him on a stream, and he was streaming with Hal; he was streaming the game with a pro player with 15k viewers, and the only reason they were playing together was because Hideouts was the guy that would manually ban cheaters that Hal encountered. To me, this was a huge disconnect: the community's first impression of this guy was that he was the "ban guy" and he advertised himself as such. Therefore, every time a cheater would be encountered, he would be "summoned" by the Pros or big streamers - coincidentally, a larger streamer he did not like, HisWattson, was trying to get the #1 Pred at the time, a well-known cheater, banned. Hideouts refused to respond or look into the issue, and it went on for months. Hal, a streamer he likes, encounters a cheater - one text, the guy is banned. Do you see the disconnect? Hideouts has never presented himself as an unbiased, neutral party; he has always been biased, always played favorites, and unfortunately made himself the focal point of the "ban" part of Respawn; he is the ban guy, bans are not happening, cheaters are everywhere - players blame the ban guy not doing anything, ban guy complains about being blamed. Had he remained a faceless security person answering Pro DMs and looking into their cases, sure... but he didn't, he put himself out there, he inserted himself at the forefront. This is the only part I disagree with: Hideouts has never communicated with anyone other than certain pros, and when others try to get him to look into anything, even stuff related to CC or LCQ, he never does unless there is a front page post on Reddit about it. I understand Devs and Players need to be aligned here, but Hideouts turned the community against himself. He was not some bystander that caught a stray.
I've been watching your shorts for while and this has been the most fascinating video, bc I love apex and tiranfall and have recently wanting to get into cybersecurity. It is awesome to see you at work and try to understand what's going on, in my favorite game.
My understanding is that Valorant anti-cheat loads at boot vs many other games that load on game launch. Makes it even more intrusive and scary if ever compromised.
yeah valorant anti cheat is basically a root kit. meaning if someone high enough at valorant wanted to do something bad or got hacked everyone with the game Installed is screwed.
I have never heard of you before, I've played games you've worked with. Can I just say I am so impressed with how you handle these situations. Your demeanor, and concise explanations are stellar. Thank you for a great video. I learned more than I expected and really appreciate your approach.
7:14 I think this is somewhat of a bad take. Just because someone is at the top of their game doesn't exempt them from being a potential cheater, it just makes it so that it's harder to detect because they know the in's and out's of the game to make it look believable.
@@thepuffinlord That's not how proof works, a player doing well in the past (in a controlled environment) doesn't preclude them cheating outside those conditions. We're not saying any of the apex players here were cheaters, we're saying past legitimate play does not act as proof that future play is cheat-free. I'm just adding that we have many examples of high-level players turning to cheats to keep up. Obviously total proof of someone not cheating is very difficult in reality so we make do with LAN tournaments as a mechanism that's good enough as a check that their skill is around the level expected from their play in an uncontrolled environment. Ultimately that only acts as a limited instance where cheating is rendered not practical, hence why it is not proof that someone never cheats, just that they didn't cheat in the instance of LAN tournaments. It is necessary but not sufficient.
I was waiting for this upload since I saw the clips of you talking about the apex clips. You were the first person I wanted to hear a POV of. This is gonna be interesting.
Facts, as SOON as it happened I was like “I’m not listening to what anyone says until Thor comments on the situation” he’s arguably the most knowledgeable guy in the area who’s public and forthcoming with information on these subjects.
The shocking thing to me, how little these guys know about their PC's when it is the main tool for their jobs. After they got hacked, they were asking chat how to scan their PC's. They didn't even know what Windows Defender was. That is like being a taxi or truck operator and not knowing anything about how your vehicle works. Even if you don't know, you should at least have someone who does know, maintaining your tool.
Not shocking at all to me. We live in increasingly abstracted world more and more things are separated into abstract layers. For example how many people know exactly what was done with beer they drink? Where it comes from? How was it made and so and so?.. Same things with computers. Hardware, Drivers, OS, GUI of OS, Cloud services. And there are more of them than I know about and there are more details in those I do. TLDR WH40K Mechanicus is scarily prophetic...
I think it’s because a lot of these pro apex players started on console and switched to pc recently. Some of my friends grew up without a pc or with only a console, and didn’t really understand some basic things until they were affected themselves and had to learn.
No it’s what the first commenter here said. How many people do you think know the mechanisms of a microwave? There’s no need to know how every piece of technology works, that would be way too much to understand. These guys excel at gaming, being good at games doesn’t require you to understand how their pc works, how their keyboard and mouse works, how their controller works, the internet they’re playing on, the electricity that powers it all.
@pofruin I would know if drinking beer was part of my job. The problem is they lack the knowledge of their devices when said devices allow them to make their career happen.
3:45 a normal cheat tool would not do this ? False. I remember clearly back in the CS 1.3-1.6 days that some hacks displayed advertisements like that after each kill or other event. You can't say tha tcheats don't do that. They sometimes do/did. Most of the times they don't since the largest percentage of cheaters are trying to hide that they're cheating and even the rage hackers sometimes want to keep their hack a secret if it's good. These guys cheat and destroyer2009 etc decided to use them as advertising platforms. Imagine that: players/athletes that are amongst the best are found cheating/doping all the times. Crazy I know. Lol
Dude as a fellow security professional, I would LOVE to see more content like this from you. Your knowledge and experience is fascinating and I wanna hear more!
This was really interesting as someone with a tertiary knowledge of security by being in low level IT. It opens my eyes to that there's a lot I can learn about the cyber sec part of IT
It was genuinely a breath of fresh air being able to hear all sides come together to have open dialogue and discussion about what the problem is, and how each side can play a part in fixing it. Discovering unique similarities because at the end of the day, they share the same goal for wanting games to thrive and succeed.
the thing where the guy is getting chased by bots, my immediate assumption would be that its just a bunch of real game clients, all logged into different accounts, running cheat software that automatically chases players. now, as for how they all got into the same game as the streamer... idk the game is free, tf2 had a similar thing going on where you could run a bunch of clients off one machine
it was so cool to hear two of my worlds colliding weigh in on both the dev side and the player side on the issues that Apex has been going through. thanks for the video!
there is one thing you haven't considered yet. apex has shit protection, in the past year and further people where able to DDOS entire lobbies. and this shit goes even further with respawn to what has happened to the Titanfall series where Titanfall one had a bot net that was spamming commands to crash servers and Titanfall 2 had a bot net that had access to the actual servers themselves and forcibly closing them without the need of a bot being in that lobby. hell Northstar, titanfall 2's community server platform that was made by the community had the same problem people are speculating apex to have, and we still don't know if it was a mistake on the Northstar devs or a mistake on respawn. btw the reason i bring this up is that apex legend runs on the exact same software as Titanfall 2, in fact most exploits for apex often get discovered on Titanfall 2 first edit: to add on to the titanfall 2 ddos bots, it was definitely server sided because it also affect console servers on both xbox and playstation
My Steam and EA Play got hacked because of Apex (a chinese using wallhacks..). Steam Guard not even triggered and they only recovered my account cuz the he/she hacked the account again while I was chatting with the Support. Now I have 2FA on EA App but still very weird that he/she was able to get into my account and access Apex. (I didn't clicked or downloaded anything sus...)
There has a been a long running vulnerability I've seen in other games where if the game implements voice chat over Steam, you can get the player's SteamID and somehow use that to obtain an IP address. No idea how that vuln works, but people have used it to DDOS me in the past. Someone showed me how to play the game disconnected from Steam to prevent the attack.
@@exmello probably a server issue, Voice chat tends to run on another server disconnected from the game, so devs put let protections on it since it can't actually connect to gameplay
Big jump in logic from ddosing to RCE. ddosing entire lobbies sounds like fine security as that means they're attacking the server not the other players.
bruh i have never known about kernal level anti-cheat till thor started talking about it with helldivers even tho i have a few games with it and im pretty angry about that they just do that knowing that i have no clue about what they are doing and the access im giving
1:23:26 On radio silence being bad, Last Epoch was a good recent example. The launch week was an absolute mess, the servers were on fire, but you had the CEO of EHG talking in the general chat of a 200,000 member discord channel getting information and reassuring people. Compare it to D4, you couldnt imagine Rod Fergusson for example having open conversation while things are going wrong
Helldivers 2 as well, CEO has been very active, taking feedback and giving updates on Server issues status in real time, it really helped me stick through the bad launch to hear they were working on it and making progress in real time
He was not in general chat, that was the art producer. The mods were deleting messages that flamed them for being radio silent between server crashes. They are still radio silent on alot of issues.
the like "zombie mode" that was created reminds me of people using CE back in good ol' Dark Souls 2 to edit effects, movesets, and spells heavily and invade pvp gank hosts who were streaming as "boss invaders". It's neat but also spooky.
What would be funny is if the hack maker intended to expose a player during the competition. But then it turned out multiple players had the hack, resulting in multiple people being compromised, and it all happened at the same time.
It was great that you were able to have the Apex pro on the stream and talk to them and see their take and perspective. They did a good job of illustrating their feelings and perceptions of the game and talking through the situation. I am glad we were able to see it.
Hey Destroyer. If you read this. Just start giving everyone Heirlooms. That should piss off EA even more.
Fr If u want to hurt EA Take away their extremly overpriced Skins. And IT will be fixed in No Time
They can gift apex packs. So give us all 500 and there we go lol
Especially if he gives me heirlooms. I bet giving me heirlooms would be the worst thing that can happen to EA, 100%.
Honestly true disable their monetization and EA will get on that instantly.
@@IdiotSun69 its true! i got word from hideouts that the only reason they dont work harder is because my boy over here has been unaffected.
The Thor dude seems like a super legit genuine dude. The advice he gives, in general, but more so at the end of this video, is incredibly authentic. I wish there were more folks in this world like that.
Good shit man.
Thor's stream and videos are exceptional. He speaks really well and is always encouraging and welcoming. Such a great twitch streamer to have on and just listen along.
One of us. One of us. One of us.
This guy is amazing on every level. I'm a fan.
Dude you have no idea hes legitimately invested in helping people stop working for the man and make shit on their own, hes going to get killed by the CIA or some shady conspiracy shit like that if he doesnt stop :p
Thor is super solid. Awesome dude.
Prime and Thor slowly realizing the capabilities of Destroyer2009 and his infamy in the community is such a wild ride lmao
He is ascending
Especially after the Titanfall issues.
I just played a game with him on apex tonight. I swear to God. I was making fun of his age.
@@Chronicleropewait this is the same guy who fucked up titsnfall? Yeaaaa that’s probably an apex thing in that chance
@@Chroniclerope Wait it's the same dude
I really appreciate Thor for his gentle pushback against Mande when he was repeating sensationalized claims (out of understandable fear), pushing against it and nudging Mande into the right direction and saying your piece without needing to call out any specific thing they said or saying anything too confrontational.
I also kind of love that it almost became a mini therapy session for Mande for a while towards the back half lmao.
Yeah, it's really sad that for him, Apex is a paycheck instead of a game he can enjoy. You've built your career/life around playing this game that you have no control or say over, and it was an extremely dangerous investment which paid off for years, but now realizing that Apex was never going to be around forever. He should've pivoted his content much earlier, but now he has to do it when no other FPS games are kind of competing for the space.
@@steamfeuvermakes me hope for the finals to pick up traction at some point. i understand the grievances, and the cheating problem is unfortunately bad, but the developers have very real care for this game and show fully that they want to make something all players can enjoy
playing a game and supporting a studio like that is really a nice breath of fresh air compared to trying to cater to a mega corporate game where you are just a number and the game is strictly a paycheck
@@mav9987I agree, in this day in age it’s smart to always have a pivot game. These games aren’t conventional sports and don’t have the stability of them either. It’s also hard to predict which games have true long term potential (ie. factors like dev, company, or gameplay issues).
I enjoyed The Finals for the first few weeks of beta and launch but soon after the game felt a little repetitive. Although the game is extremely dynamic, it also feels monotonous at the same time. Maybe more unique maps, or gameplay loops would help improve it but who knows.
@@jyk8991 needs way more modes. i compare it to overwatch more than i do apex, and what keeps overwatch fresh is its plethora of maps and modes. once they get them going down we can really see people sticking to the game in full
A man who has worked both in govt and corp and has damn well learned to be persuasive and gentle
Thor - Top tier security specialist, years of experience, many notable achievements, former wielder of the mighty banhammer!
Prime: - Massive security liability, damn near wiped out Netflix on an oopsie......
@@Astraeus.. wait when did prime almost take out Netflix lol
@@imperialis40kthe grizzly bug
Thor, your thumbnails might be made in 5 minutes and have Comic Sans for the font, but we love you anyways. Glory to the Goblin King
glory to the goblin king!!!
All hail the goblin king!
comic sans is the best font for the internet.
Comic sans is actually helpful for dyslexic people
Comic sans is better than thor mouse writing.. but we still love it anyway.
About the serverside exploitation section: The code for the things happening in this clip, exist within the game files.
1) Spawning bots. There was a limited time mode for Halloween where you could get two AI companions (Prowlers) which acted autonomously with a simple AI to chase and melee enemies within a certain range of you.
2) Increased squad size. There was a limited time mode, in which SURVIVORS killed by HUNTERS switched sides to HUNTERS, enabling teams of dozens on the HUNTER side.
The Hackers just need a way to activate combinations of existing legacy functions in the game.
Very good point. Just because none of the buttons in the game assemble a packet to spawn bots anymore does not mean that nobody could assemble one by hand/ with a program. If both of those features are left in, no RCE'd be necessary.
Ah, this makes my thoughts of simply using actual bots less likely. With those, he could use valid commands with invalid context sent to the server.
So, pretty much the hacker can use whatever asset the devs have left in the files and create whatever he wants so long as they have existed in said files while making a few adjustments here and there.
Apex is his sandbox.
But also, the hacker needed to gather all these bots in the same lobby with his target player, and the game treats these bots as players, which means that the hacker had to use a matchmaking system to get them into the same match with the target player. Doesn't this make it logical to assume that this is a server hack, with some kind of "admin permissions"? It's very similar to what cheaters do in gta online and rdr2 imho
This reminds me of Smash Ultimate hackers loading singleplayer boss battle arenas to play normal Vs. online matches. The server and other clients simply didn't validate that the stage ID being requested was actually selectable for Vs, that's all.
With access to the server RCON, debug commands used by the developers to test server functionality prior to events becomes possible. Commands that may explicitly be designed to allow stuff to be tested out of context, without engaging the game mode they were intended for. The same kind of command used by the original server administrators for all kinds of things, including, but not limited to, banning and unbanning players.
"Im cheating Im cheating!" is such a wild callout
Yeah I thought the same thing. He didn't say "something is wrong." He immediately recognized it as a hack. Not a possible glitch or even a thought that it could be. This makes me believe that person is familiar with the cheat interface at the very least. The wording of that call out could be a Freudian slip.
@@fivetriplezero8985 He somehow knew how to make the cheat loader disappear after it popped up.
@@fivetriplezero8985 you would notice an aimbot or wallhacks instantaneously if you were playing a game, you have spent 1000+ hours in
@@fivetriplezero8985 I'd say anybody who spends a significant amount of time in FPS games, especially at higher levels where they have a lot more knowledge, they know what that stuff looks like. Like, I pretty regularly see clips of cheaters being exposed or stuff like that, it's not all that uncommon. Plus, it's pretty obvious it's a cheat even from a glance. Suddenly you don't have control of your mouse and it's just lasering down people, and you can see them through the wall? It takes half a second of reasoning to understand what's happening.
@@fivetriplezero8985
Being high level players in a game that has people that generally cheat sometimes in lobbies, I’m sure they’d be able to recognize an aimbot right away. I probably would and I’m a diamond scrub
I work in the cybersecurity industry and also live in the Seattle area. Love your channel, your mission (from my own perspective), someone that actually understands red/purple/blue teams and the role they play in an organization, and how software and application development is deployed and the issues that arise when CI/CD and QA processes are weak with no culture around collaboration across team functions. You get it. You’re a pro. And your opinions and expertise shared on this channel has impacts across the gaming industry. Keep up the amazing work! The gaming community needs more like you to speak up!
Id usually laugh at the sentence "I'm a hacker" but your experience and ability to speak effectively and confidently really help ring home how that honestly an understatement
One of the rare occasions where someone saying "I'm a hacker" is actually exactly that.
@@Pointykek right. I wish I had that skill set. just got into the PC gaming world and the knowledge to protect myself would be priceless to me.
@@twostonedactual2541 I dont have the best skills, but i rec just double checking if you feel sketch about something. I always just do a small search about files or sites before anything
@@twostonedactual2541even if you’re not a PC gamer, the knowledge that you can use to protect your identity and data is priceless. Everyone should be made aware of security.
@Pointykek It's an understatement. He does more than know the game, he knows the game development, business and even the streaming sides.
This is such a fascinating conversation. Having a cyber security expert, in the gaming space, while a major network breach happens, in the middle of a massive esports tournament is such a rare occurrence. I’ll definitely be following closely.
Man, this video is blowing up! Mad props for the work and knowledge that goes behind this, you're doing the lords work by getting this stuff the exposure it deserves.
I've never made a tip before on RUclips but your shorts always pop up in my feed and your advice has genuinely had a positive impact on both my work and personal life. Figured this is a way I could return the favor, thank you for everything you do.
You could have spent all that money on drugs and hookers.
Destroyer is infamous in the apex community for doing things like dropping bots on streamers mid ranked game and giving people thousands of apex packs
And running his pc cheats on console, he's able to use his pc accounts and hacks on console lobbies and *nobody* but him knows how.
they talk about this in the video thank you for reminding me
The law needs to be updated to reflux these trolls.
@@meowxeno possibly abusing or exploiting the crossplay system
Damn bruh can he slide me some packs I need my heirlooms 😭
22:40 reminded me of when the Division stored all your character and weapon stats in a text file that you could edit however you wanted
Good times! God that was so funny.
Sounds like such a ubisoft thing to do
I remember that!!!!!
Ubisoft try to be competent challenge:IMPOSSIBLE DIFFICULTY
that was pretty much all games 15 years ago.
Thor, after over a decade of working in an ICT Support/SysAdmin role and not feeling great progression, I'm part of site wide lay off but this allows me to upskill...
Watching your videos and streams over the past year and seeing your passion for what you do and did in the past, inspired me into pursuing my interests/instincts in security and analytics.
I absolutely love it!
Thank you for the always informative and enjoyable content, I think I speak for the majority by saying that you're very much an inspiration to to many!
It's incredibly refreshing to hear someone advocating for compassion while not invalidating the anger the community feels. Wish I could catch your streams, but I'm happy to have found your YT content.
Invalidating? Dude get an actual life.
@@Dr.RojoMcDelly bit of a ironic comment
@@Dr.RojoMcDelly Those exist?
He streams pretty consistently at I think 3-4am EST? and then he streams for around 12 hours,
@@Dr.RojoMcDelly what
I love thor and i love thors ability to be like we shouldnt be claiming we know we dont and also when given new info "oh this changes things". To many people are scared to admit either of those things.
That’s the difference between amateur and professional.
@@Ray-mj5mjmoreso the difference between someone with critical thinking skills and an idiot.
@@Nubleborskyexactly, one does not need to be a professional to use their brain.
@@Ehh..... Professionals use their brain
Is this thors channel
"The marketing and merchandising teams are going to keep going even if the game is on fire because that was there release schedule. Not every team stops just because one aspect of the game is broken"
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SAYING THIS.
Coming from the Halo Infinite team it was so tiring seeing every single external media post get flooded with comments like "Why are you releasing a new audiobook?! FIX THE GAME!!!. Why are you releasing a fun little cookbook?? FIX THE GAME!!! Why are you putting more cosmetics on the store!!!? FIX THE GAME!!!!" My brother, it's not the art team's job to fix the game, or the marketing, or franchise, or legal's team to fix the game. It's QA and engineers and every time they come into work it's like opening the door to a furnace. And yes absolutely, imagine how hard it is to solve these massively entangled issues ON TOP of the community hating your guts and giving you negative morale all day every day for even mundane things, let alone serious issues.
You want stuff to get fixed? Honest to god, just submit a support ticket and be as unbiased and objective with your description as possible. QA needs plain facts and raw information to work with. The more of that they have the better they can prioritize and fix things. No matter how angry you get or how betrayed you feel or how crap the game seems to be at the end of the day its really just that simple. Twitter rage doesn't fix those kinds of problems. Basic support tickets do.
Developing sounds like a massive headache kudos to y'all
Didn't know making a game was that hard, I thought you just needed an art team some coders and that's really it.
343 doesn’t listen to fans, they haven’t for the last decade+
The servers of Respawn being vulnerable is a story as old as the company. They literally stopped selling Titanfall 1 because its servers are/were trashed by apparently a single hacker.
And the Titanfall 2 community kept their game alive by modding the game and adding a custom server browser and custom gamemodes for the game back when the same hackers were attacking the Titanfall 2 servers. Now TF|2 is playable again on vanilla servers but who knows how long that will last.
That's what I find so weird about this Apex's server compromission. 4 months after TF|2 servers are patch it's the Apex servers that are underfire. Imagine if the hacker would find a way to automate waves of bots to render the game unplayable like he automated server crash in TF|2 ?
This is the scariest part. It's EA and Respawn's negligence or ignorance of fixing their games from hackers. It goes to show that modders from the community have more control over the game than the people who created them.
It's pretty much up to Respawn and EA to figure out if they want to make an effort to care for the breadwinner or simply craft another one and hope it does well financially.
The fact they still use stryder baffles me. Despite how many times it has shown how its old age is effecting it, they still decide thats its perfectly safe.
They just need to fix stryder or take it down.
@@Sorrowgrave No thats wrong there was a group that "tried" to combat the "hacker" which they then turned evil to hack tf2 just flooding servers with bots and then did the same with apex and changed the msg of the day to their groups name and they boasted it was all easy cause respawn used the same security layout for all three games all while EA was selling tf1/2 at discount while fully knowing no one could play any of the games for years and apex being down for like 2 days at the same time.
EXACTLY THIS did people forget about titanfall's hackers?
It really speaks to your character seeing your opinion change in realtime as you're being fed new information. Incredible insight
@@jrpgplayer ermm like seriously they must be literally stupid
@@jrpgplayer yup
More analysis than opinion.
Flip flop flip flop
It’s not character lol. You cannot solve problems without basic critical thinking skills.
Your knowledge is unmatched and your natural intuition and experience is beyond commendable and I have learned so much from watching you, Thor. You are incredible. Thank you.
This is very interesting stuff. Its really nice to see a dev take on this case.
He’s not just a dev. He’s also a hacker and a cyber security guy he’s got crazy qualification’s and experience
Yeah we got that. He said that multiple times in the video. Cool perspective anyways
@@jjsummerz no shit shirlock
@@jjsummerz oh wow, if only he said that right at the beginning.
@@80AM. calm down, they're trying to help
Man… the care you took to make sure you understood Mande and words of encouragement was really amazing to see. You are such an amazing guy.
Thor=best fuse I'll never look at fuse again without seeing Thor's face
has experience spoke volumes in his his dialogue with Mande. kept to 100 with him while validating feelings. i can tell ones things for sure. Thor is an amazing boss.
@@dixiestix2197 je de w,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Gulk gulk gulk. You’re gagging on it
“The aimbot is not to far off from his normal skills” as Thor is paused on a frame where in the bottom right he also hit for 40 shield and 72 flesh, while the ads is not even on those people 😂
O89.
I'd just like to say thank you for listening to Mande's complaints and responding in the way that you did. While I don't know the guy that well it felt like you got through to him pretty well and helped him to sort some things out in his head and get some things off his chest. I feel too much that people have an Us V Them mentality when it comes to defending people in their industry and the fact that you were able to make Mande feel heard and understood while showing him how it all works, why he feels that way, and have him come out of the conversation understanding the other side while still feeling his grievances were valid was a wonderful thing. I sincerely hope more developers and community managers take note of that, as I reckon it'd help make discourse around these sorts of issues calmer and more constructive.
Thor has extensive social engineering experience. He could hate Mande's guts :P
Mande is a pretty chill guy, he never is a negative type but he’s been dealing with cheating for MONTHS to the point where some days he had to stop playing sadly because it was every game, and he is tired of respawn not doing anything ( it feels like they arnt ) but yea it’s nice he listens to Mande and also gives him some intel on the employee side of things was a cool call tbh
Super super good conversation. Never listened to long form pirate software before. What a lovely guy breaking down a complex topic in a really good and considerate way towards the players and the company
The Thor/Mande crossover! Unexpected but very welcome 🤝🍻👏
Primagen/Thor/Mande
Primagen called Thor to get an opinion on the hacks and then they invited Mande to join their talk.
Mande just talking gibberish
@@moodmusic4life He was just giving context, he didnt talk technical... tf are you talking about?
Now we need them with Destroyer in a call.
@@moodmusic4life first time I've seen someone not understand what the word "gibberish" means. Impressive.
28:59 the hacker wants either clout or they want to cause harm to apex’s reputation.
And to think not that long ago I remember thinking “who’s private software and why is he in my TikTok and shorts so much?” Now when this happened I thought “I wonder what pirate will say.”
Love it
So rad to finally have an entertaining, prominent voice in the streaming space that can react to things like this with an informed perspective (and inform viewers in the process). So much stuff to digest here, and yet super easy to follow 🙏
Fr my number one pet peeve of react youtubers is when they are so uninformed yet try to make these big elaborate deductions or statements on something when they have no idea what they’re talking about.
Reminds me of @TotalBiscuit
It is also meaningless to say that they are the top 2 and use it as an argument for that they did nothing wrong. 😂
Some lore on Destroyer2009
Destroyer is a kid who got hardware banned on rust like 5 years ago which sent him down a coding/exploiting rabbit hole. He is a fan of apex who has been developing cheats and finding vulnerabilities in the game for a long time. This level of breach is impressive and I’m curious to know what level of access to the server and or client he really has
Ive seen his name around before in rust too bro wth??? I swear I was griefed by the destroyer2009 on rust ages ago lol.😂
Sounds like something destroyer2009 would comment 👀
Didn't he have a stint on Titanfall 2 that as well?
@@mr.jojomunoz6561 He's just relaying what he heard on Mande's second video with destroyer, doesn't look like many people have seen that video an I advise checking it out lol
Another thing destroyer mentioned was having 200 accounts in queue trying to get into the game, so everyone thinking he's "spawning bots through code" are off the mark xD
Plot-twist: in reality he just compromised 1 employee's pc and 2 streamers' pc, and that's about it.
Imagine being such a Gigachad in cybersecurity industry and be like:
"Nah, my passion is making games and petting ferrets".
Like those Ultimate Samurai with unmatched sword skills who become farmers just for a peace of mind
Not the hero we deserved, but the one we needed
Thor-finn
He's basically a peaceful npc who just so happens to also be the most OP character to fight against.
This is literally the plot of the several games in the Yakuza series
@@yosukehanamura3507Dragon of _Thor_-jima
On the topic of communication and devs, I haven't played the game in a long while but I will always respect the team at Warframe for how they are able to take one of the biggest spaghetti messes of a videogame and cultivate a relatively positive relationship with the community. The devs are playing and talking in game to people, they're doing livestreams where they directly talk about things rather than avoiding them, they'll say "hey, guess what, that plan we had - you all tweeted us telling us it sucked and you hated it, so we recognise it's a mistake and we're not going to do it", and then they lighten the mood with some memes and human interactions and positivity. Rebecca and Megan from the community team and some of the devs like Pablo who just literally sit on a sofa once a month or tweet reply to people do more than any crafted PR statement or new shiny distraction could ever do to get players on side.
Isnt Megan incharge of DE now?
again take this with a grain of salt because I haven't been close to the game for a while, but my last understanding was that Megan was community manager and Rebecca was her boss and one of the directors@@MonlopoMAN
the fun part of warframe is that it doesn't hide obvious problems in the game and make it funny instead of make you afraid/ angry
Warframe devs need to make an actual hard game not a fucking snoozefest. 5/10 game would easily be 10/10 if there was any sort of challenge at all.
I love them bringing in the apex player because it shows both sides on how people are approaching this information. You have the InfoSec/Dev side and the average end user side.
Mande isn't the average apex player but I get your point 😂
This is by far the best video about the subject. Literally professionals who care about what they are talking about and not just farming content.
He doesn’t know a thing about apex, nor the tournament, nor the streamers. He’s made 3 false accusations in the first 5 mins. Worst breakdown yet.
@@tylermorrison509 he didn't have all the information. He made conclusions based on what he knew at the time. While he doesn't know apex, he then had someone who does join him so he could discuss and rethink with new information
@@tylermorrison509 Considering it's been his job for 20 years, and he was following the process of elimination (basic problem solving, doesn't require his job or training)- you sound dense.
@@tylermorrison509 sounds like 5 mins is how long your attention span is.
@@linhza501 right, that’s why I watched the whole thing
the weird thing about the whole situation to me is: some days prior to this these players got gifted A LOT of lootboxes (like 10k usd worth or something like it) while livestreaming. It could be possible that these hackers found a way to connect and execute code on the player's clients, but had no way of telling which client was which player. They started gifting those Apex Packs to those who were livestreaming to sort of "connect the dots" and find out which "client ID" was which player.
This is just my theory, could also be anything else as Im not an expert, but seems weird to me that those 2 players BOTH received these packs gifted to them merely days prior to this competition.
Unlisted gang has arrived.
wat you mean, friend?
@@coaiemandushman1079this video was originally unlisted when thor first posted the link lol.
Woot
@@Kaimax61why?
@@Kaimax61wouldnt it be more beneficial to post it NOT unlisted to get more views? I never heard of him before this.
Irregardless tho he posted this at 4am my time when i was getting ready to sleep so i didnt even notice
Thanks for posting this Thor. I was checking in about this since someone else was asking about it and you were the first person that I figured would have the best grasp of the situation [outside the company]. I was not disappointed with the discussion. Great insights on the internal workings within a large company. Keep up the great work.
Nobody seems to have noticed the last option in the "TSM HALAL HOOK" cheat window:
✅ Vote Putin
lol
It seems like the majority of my comments are getting censored on this stoopid website! Anyway, I'm sorry for that...
Look at the last option inside the "TSM HALAL HOOK" window. I can't repeat these word here, apparently... I think it might give us a tiny bit of information about the hacker's physical location, or at least from what kind of demographic he is from.
edit: That's assuming that cheat tool was made by this/these individual(s), which might not be the case.
Lol never heard "fog of war" repeated so much in one sitting. It's like he had Term of the Day toilet paper or something.
Everything else aside, I think its really awesome how you could, and did, give Mande some peace of mind, great overall advice etc. Ofc you do it for your viewers a lot, which is what I greatly respect, but the guy is sounds so clearly relieved after he could vent a bit and had some of his worries put to rest
im so glad you uploaded this whole thing, man
so many people heard you say "I think his machine is compromised" in the first few minutes- punched it in as a headline and clipped it, and now people think Apex is 100% good and these two just have malware...
(WE dON'T KNOW YET).
imo, the most concerning thing is that EA/Respawn have said NOTHING in 30+ hrs...
We know now
@@onikruxThey would probably just say "Dunno, we're looking into it", and since they probably are, what is the point in saying anything?
@@aeswere that's exactly what they posted last night hahah
@@aeswerecommunity communication would be the reason i suppose. its kinda more of a courtesy thing?
The Destro seems rly chill, he can gift me some packs if he wants.
Man it's really cool that talking about anti-cheat is becoming more mainstream now! As a bonus most anti-cheat devs are huge nerds and truly love thier craft. It's very fun to listen to and when the person talking knows WAAAAY more than the normal player real things can happen. Knowledge is power, and is the players have more knowledge then that can help everyone!
I really hope Thor sees this, not that I expect that he will.
The part at 1:24:25 where he sympathises with the Devs, The devs are doing as much as they can. It’s EA, the publisher that bought the game studio that makes apex, Respawn Entertainment, that are too greedy to employ a proper team and implement necessary systems. The game has generated $bns and EA is definitely capable of employing the adequate number of protection staff for this
They just dont fucking care
He is right on that one. - Even if the leasdership doesnt do S___ about this, the devs probably would - if they were let, and not busy with "important" other work.
Most companies just shove you into several projects at once, and you just try to manage every single one of those with the time you have.
If they dont allow you to work on this, you just dont.
So yeah, hating devs is never a good solution. You can definitely argue about the leadership though.
@@Ebikoyou hit the spot. leadership is more likely to not do anything and think of it as publicity that they can leverage off of
Sadly, he knows. He knows EA are just as terrible as Blizzard, but he's giving faith that Respawn can still find a solution to combat the situation. Hopefully third time is the charm and Respawn can finally their breadwinner from getting demolished by hackers.
You’re talking out of your arse.
Yes we all know EA sucks but if a game has exploits it’s the game devs fault, not ea.
it feels like you don’t know how the business work.
EA bought respawn game releases under their brand. They have zero to do with the game in it self and let’s all companies under brand develop their games as they wish. Only thing EA cares about is looking at papers seeing profits
@cyphercracker So it's not their fault that it became more and more monetized to stay free-to-play? EA has done this before many times over...
Woah Woah WOAH! He has banned 2 million players, and his job was hacking power plants for the federal government! Woah. I like this dude. :D
Thanks for posting this Thor. I was checking in about this since someone else was asking about it and you were the first person that I figured would have the best grasp of the situation!!
How on earth do you get verified as a chicken
@@channingtaintumbro must be chicken
omg it's the legend himself
Man literally chose the best legend for the thumbnail.
Representing all middle aged man in the game
“This ain’t me first rodeo, mate”😂
Fusey 4 lyfe
also two reasons as to why valorant are not as cheater infested is cause you have their fog of war system that doesnt give full information to your client AND it is a 5v5 game so say that 10% of players are cheating, that means in any given game the probability that you have 1 cheater is statistically "avrage". while in BR games that avrage increases with the amount of players in said game.
Can we just talk about that apex legends is literally a fork of half life 2's source engine.
Its insane how much they developed it
Yeah I played for years without even knowing that. Plays so different from Source.
Is it ureal engine with source physicks?
This is is also it's Achilles heels atm, some serious audio issues and more seems to be unable to be fixed.
So is both titanfall game the engine is crazy and been in c0nt. Dev for decades btw
I always thought they were using Frostbite...
As a college student in cyber security these things are always interesting and I love the discussion. I always feel like I'm learning more, especially when it comes to the analysis of the issue. Greatly appreciated
As someone who does security, this is exactly what it looks like (PirateSoftware's handling) - you verify every claim, using all the evidence. He drew out the information from the subject matter experts with perfect questions, building out connections where possible. Trying not to make them certain where they're not. Assumptions will kill you as badly as grumpy employees and phishing attacks will. There is a LOT to learn from watching this.
Damn this seems way more kaid back than engineering I may have chosen the wrong career 💀
Love how 30 secs into this hour and a half vid you made it so clear as of who you are. I love you men! Congrats on that Steam Award, been watching you since then. Can't believe I spent most of my time on YT and Twitch without watching you.
LOL I watch a lot of ThePrimeagen and a bit of Thor
and I watch a lot of apex competitive
This is the crossover I've never expected
I've never heard of ThePrimeagen, is he talking in the video?
@@Joeyfield0 He's the other dude talking to Thor at the beginning/rest of the video sporadically. The other guy who joins midway is some apex player judging by what he's saying about the game.
@@Pixelbendr okay thanks, his channel looks interesting i might check him out
@@Joeyfield0 as Pixelbendr said. To add context, he is a developer at netflix with a large community on youtube twitch and overall super funny and smart guy.
The other guy joining is TSM Mande, but he had a lot of success filling in for apex pros, and this season he was also competing in ALGS with his semi-seriouss team of streamers.
So glad this guy seems to know what he is talking about. So much reactionary content regarding this and people re-formatting (after a quick how do i re format search) their pc.
What is re-formating?
@@magnum3.14 how would i know. Just some word believe I heard somewhere, sounds computerish. There can only by one true magnum btw. Prepare to duel.
@@magnum3.14 When using a new data drive, you have to format it(im not savvy enough to know exactly what formatting does, but it basically allocates space in the drive for the computers to use). Re-formatting means youre completely wiping all data on that drive by allocating that space again. Wiping a drive means there is a high chance of wiping any virusses lodged in it. Wont work on hardware virusses unfortunately but these are extremely rare.
@@Zephiren you are a better person than me, i automatically assumed with a question like that ( can easily be googled) the guy was trolling.
Thanks for this, as a fellow cyber security professional its awesome to see you give direction and information to people!
Watched this from Mandes stream yesterday and you blew my mind. Instantly subbed and liked when I saw this pop up on my feed. Thank you for your knowledge and insight!!
I learned so much about critical thinking from this conversation. Thanks for doing this Thor
1:07:44 "You cannot support a place, an say they're awful, and also keep on going to them, cuz that's a toxic relationship". So what ? We buy a game, and we should stop saying that devs are lazy and don't do anything ? We should stop playing games because we're gonna be screwed at some point by this repetitive situation ? And should we stop using computers too ? People want to consume things. There is a world of wonders around them, and they should just shut up or leave because that's "toxic" to keep going on using a software or a computer or a game they love ? Wtf is that ?? That's reversing the responsability.
I don't buy the "devs do what they can, you have to believe it" : if they were that interested in solving the phenomenon of cheating, firstable they would REQUIRE PHONE NUMBERS for everybody so in case that a cheater is caught, it can't come back years later, then secondly they would develop an anti-cheat SERVER-SIDE. Like monitoring the speed of players, their aim, etc. That's not easy for some parameters but that should be doable, and most of all : bullet-proof, because hackers could do nothing with no hands on the server. All cheating sofwtare would die instantly. Also, they should provide players a way to RECORD in-game what they see, and to gather groups of reviewers that can review clips and assign a degree of "heat" based on what they see, then by an algorithmic process a ban or at least a quarantine could be triggered after a certain heat was reached.
Punkbuster did use human intervention back in 2003 for Wolfenstein Enemy Territory : screenshots were automatically made and sent to a database, and people on forums could review those screenshots and "detects" if they were seeing strange things. That's called "intelligence", and that's what is missing in development since twenty years. So people are pissed off to see such a lack of imagination and dedication to what they pay for.
I was so glad to hear you talk about the dev side of things. As a dev myself, it's so sad to see how bad people bash the devs. I can guarantee there are some devs at Respawn that truly hate to see the game in this state, and would love nothing more than to fix it. But unfortunately, they're under EA. If the big boss says "new legend first, bug fixes later", then you have to do it. You can't go rogue or your job is toast and you can't feed your family. It really sucks but at the end of the day that's the reality of it.
I also agree that more companies need much better community relations. For EA, I can probably guess it's about money. They won't dare admit fault or their stock prices tank. At the end of the day, we have to speak with our wallets. Which also sucks because as stated in the video, many people may not encounter the same issues as Mande. In my 3 years of playing Apex, I have personally ran into maybe 1 cheater long ago. So yeah just an unfortunate situation all around.
Yes and no, respawn (the apex devs) have had this problem on almost every game they’ve made, while you’re right what the big boss says goes, you’d think after the 3rd game failing because of hackers you’d have a better plan going into it, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, is this any different?
While you speak truth, not a lot are going to care. You speak with an insider point of view but people don't want to hear that.
It's hard not to feel antagonistic towards developers when the game keeps getting worse and worse and seemingly all they do is ask 200 euros for a knife.
@DoktorJammified tbf it isn't respawn that sets the prices its ea. Ea says how much money the need/want to make in set amount of time and respawn has to do it or say bye bye to funding and anything else ea provides for respawn
you approach these conversations with such empathy when speaking to players. I wish more game companies would communicate with the player base in the ways discussed in this video.
I deleted Apex a few years ago jow the cheaters were so common in both quick play & ranked, it just wasn't fun getting stomped by the crossmap aimbots and maphax making trying to even play smart pointless.
Thank you for cutting this out from your stream to make it easier to find/watch. I love this content but I would miss it as I don't get to watch every or the entire live streams so I am glad this was shared to get the info.
Guy's clearly in or around the community, so him spear phishing some prominent members to compromise their computers makes perfect sense to me. I assume most big streamers get stuff all the time that attempts to steal passwords, discord/youtube auth tokens etc, but people slip up all the time.
To be fair, a lot of streamers,pros,etc dont even know how to actually use a computer properly. Wich is kinda ironic considering their job depends on it.
Sure. Ill grant that. But none, and i mean none of that, in any capacity, would give the infiltrator server side access. Spawning hundreds of real time, live bots, in ranked games, top 500 lobvies, that the server sees as genuine players, just cannot be a client side exploit.
@@JustAPriapism Oh yeah, he's obviously able to do stuff on the server too. I'm just more iffy on the client side RCE stuff is all.
The easiest and most likely way is that destroyer is the developer for cheat engines that those players have downloaded.
Spear phishing is incredibly hard to do to a streamer. I get the clip on this video shows how stupid they can be, but most streamers wouldn't fall for just any phishing scam, partially because they don't have a real business, and can easily recognize scam emails/messages due to the nature of their job. At a corporation a person could slip one through an overworked HR person or something like that but it scales up in hardness as the traffic through and size of the business scales down. Also it would be exceedingly hard to spear phish 3 people successfully in only a few months from the same community. The nature of the hacks being turned on also seems odd. Why wouldn't destroyer give each one the exact same cheats and display overlay/callouts? Maybe one of them really was compromised but the others just hit the wrong hot key? Or was destroyer just toggling them on in the state they already were to out those people for using them?
decoupling! Good in your code, bad in your videogame supercorporation. Why can't the PR team work with the security team and stuff? Answer is it's not built that way, it's a huge machine with tons of moving parts and modularity is harnessed to manage all that. But it's too extreme, I think the current concept of corporations is inherently flawed, especially the stock investment stuff is rotten these days.
This is a messed up problem because it reminds you of the crap that is stinking up society and economy, but then it messes up the very videogames and content you use to get your mind off of that. I'm honestly glad I'm not at all involved with Apex Legends! (laughs in Nintendo Fan T-T)
Destroyer2009 i know you are watching this video, if you really want attention give us all heirlooms
Full send it
Apex players be so thirsty for heirlooms istg. Also, I think he already did that. They talked about it in the video. You didn't expect to *keep* the heirlooms, did you? Respawn patched it and took everyone's items away.
@@NedInYaHead That wasn't Destroyer, lol. That was a whole separate issue that wasn't even related to cheating at all. It was a game bug that everyone was able to easily exploit to access all heirlooms without unlocking them.
thank you for clarifying the issues and not spreading miss information. it's refreshing to see someone who has a background on these issues and able to explain what's happening "in a simple way" and not jump to conclusions. Me being new here I'm definitely going to be watching more of your content that has to do with hacking since I find it fascinating and uneducated on the matter.
Respawn just seems to be a massive target for this and does not seem to have reacted to it well at all, and it's been constant for years in Apex and Titanfall. It's such a shame
The facepalm at 11:18 with free download... that went deep...
I mean that like what to not do on the Internet 101, it's like the number one tennis player watching an amateur match where a guy fucks up the serve and breaks his arm in the process
yeah and it happend AFTER the ALGS. Hal was downloading a anti malware programm.
hey Thor. Just wanted to thank you for informing us of the dangers between client side and server side stuff. The video was very enlightening of the situations both developers and players have to face. Know that I will be a part of the community that will see what other activities you want to branch out to as well. Thanks as always.
Even as a non-Apex Player, this video was extremely interesting!
From the Support to the Game Devs, to bringing in Mande, this was all done very respectfully and was very helpful in understanding what goes on behind the scenes of ANY online game.
Also, though I've never heard of him(as I don't play or follow Apex), Mande seems like an absolute stand-up guy!
In the server-side exploitation section, if Hal is playing on a compromised machine, they could redirect the matchmaking process of HIS game to connect to the hacker's server which would allow that zombie-bot behavior. Or it could simply be that they can join the same player's server, quickly filling it up with these bots of their own. Depends on the process to joining that server.
In any case, it's an interesting video. Thanks!
These are Apex Predator lobbies with real players, and he is dropping 40 bots on them that count as one squad. If you continued watching you would've heard those bits.
@@DoNotFearTheReapa Yeah, I paused and wrote that but I actually kept watching after my comment and what I said was discussed almost verbatim. Hah.
As a consistent Apex Viewer in the comp scene and the general streamer community I really appreciate your words Thor. Mande is a good representative I think for the way most of the players feel. Without any recent word from Official Apex sources I will not have Apex content to watch and will choosing not to play Apex for the time being. Will be checking out the Pirate Software content instead since it seems to be made with a lot of thought, consideration, and really good quality audio.
“Hack the planet!!!”
I am telling you... It was the ferrets... THE FERRETS !!!
I think the issue with Hideouts (the guy you tweet quoted) is not in this, it is in his total silence [before] and [after] this scenario. I remember the first time I ever saw him on a stream, and he was streaming with Hal; he was streaming the game with a pro player with 15k viewers, and the only reason they were playing together was because Hideouts was the guy that would manually ban cheaters that Hal encountered.
To me, this was a huge disconnect: the community's first impression of this guy was that he was the "ban guy" and he advertised himself as such. Therefore, every time a cheater would be encountered, he would be "summoned" by the Pros or big streamers - coincidentally, a larger streamer he did not like, HisWattson, was trying to get the #1 Pred at the time, a well-known cheater, banned. Hideouts refused to respond or look into the issue, and it went on for months. Hal, a streamer he likes, encounters a cheater - one text, the guy is banned. Do you see the disconnect?
Hideouts has never presented himself as an unbiased, neutral party; he has always been biased, always played favorites, and unfortunately made himself the focal point of the "ban" part of Respawn; he is the ban guy, bans are not happening, cheaters are everywhere - players blame the ban guy not doing anything, ban guy complains about being blamed. Had he remained a faceless security person answering Pro DMs and looking into their cases, sure... but he didn't, he put himself out there, he inserted himself at the forefront.
This is the only part I disagree with: Hideouts has never communicated with anyone other than certain pros, and when others try to get him to look into anything, even stuff related to CC or LCQ, he never does unless there is a front page post on Reddit about it.
I understand Devs and Players need to be aligned here, but Hideouts turned the community against himself. He was not some bystander that caught a stray.
Well said, Regular Dude
This guy was fun at first, now its a weird soapbox crusade
This super interesting. I recently just started school for cyber security. I'd love here more about Cybersecurity stuff from you
watch all of this guys videos and shorts, great content
save our world from the chineses cyber terrorists plz
He streams daily (except Thursdays) on Twitch and RUclips and answers lots of questions while developing and/or playing games.
If you join his discord he has a massive collection of information and tools regarding this stuff.
I've been watching your shorts for while and this has been the most fascinating video, bc I love apex and tiranfall and have recently wanting to get into cybersecurity. It is awesome to see you at work and try to understand what's going on, in my favorite game.
Woh woh woh, titanfall 2 is still lit and has never had any issues ever. My 2 cents 😂
My understanding is that Valorant anti-cheat loads at boot vs many other games that load on game launch.
Makes it even more intrusive and scary if ever compromised.
yeah valorant anti cheat is basically a root kit. meaning if someone high enough at valorant wanted to do something bad or got hacked everyone with the game Installed is screwed.
I have never heard of you before, I've played games you've worked with. Can I just say I am so impressed with how you handle these situations. Your demeanor, and concise explanations are stellar. Thank you for a great video. I learned more than I expected and really appreciate your approach.
4th Most Toxic Scandal On the Planet - 3
FACTS. THE PROGRAMS WERE ALREADY ON HIS COMPUTER
Makes it easier for a hacker know? There malware is already on there
It's defined by IP/VPN to my belief
Not true
Its funny that most of the apex streamers say stop spending money on the game, but walk around with every new skin / heirloom
7:14 I think this is somewhat of a bad take. Just because someone is at the top of their game doesn't exempt them from being a potential cheater, it just makes it so that it's harder to detect because they know the in's and out's of the game to make it look believable.
If anything it increases the chance that someone is a cheater to maintain their position. We've seen it plenty of times with cheated speed runs
@@scaredscorpion except it’s kind of disproved when he’s won LAN more than once
@@thepuffinlord That's not how proof works, a player doing well in the past (in a controlled environment) doesn't preclude them cheating outside those conditions. We're not saying any of the apex players here were cheaters, we're saying past legitimate play does not act as proof that future play is cheat-free. I'm just adding that we have many examples of high-level players turning to cheats to keep up.
Obviously total proof of someone not cheating is very difficult in reality so we make do with LAN tournaments as a mechanism that's good enough as a check that their skill is around the level expected from their play in an uncontrolled environment. Ultimately that only acts as a limited instance where cheating is rendered not practical, hence why it is not proof that someone never cheats, just that they didn't cheat in the instance of LAN tournaments. It is necessary but not sufficient.
I was waiting for this upload since I saw the clips of you talking about the apex clips. You were the first person I wanted to hear a POV of. This is gonna be interesting.
Facts, as SOON as it happened I was like “I’m not listening to what anyone says until Thor comments on the situation” he’s arguably the most knowledgeable guy in the area who’s public and forthcoming with information on these subjects.
what a great thumbnail!
The shocking thing to me, how little these guys know about their PC's when it is the main tool for their jobs. After they got hacked, they were asking chat how to scan their PC's. They didn't even know what Windows Defender was. That is like being a taxi or truck operator and not knowing anything about how your vehicle works. Even if you don't know, you should at least have someone who does know, maintaining your tool.
Most zoomers are computer-illiterate.
Not shocking at all to me. We live in increasingly abstracted world more and more things are separated into abstract layers. For example how many people know exactly what was done with beer they drink? Where it comes from? How was it made and so and so?.. Same things with computers. Hardware, Drivers, OS, GUI of OS, Cloud services. And there are more of them than I know about and there are more details in those I do.
TLDR WH40K Mechanicus is scarily prophetic...
I think it’s because a lot of these pro apex players started on console and switched to pc recently. Some of my friends grew up without a pc or with only a console, and didn’t really understand some basic things until they were affected themselves and had to learn.
No it’s what the first commenter here said. How many people do you think know the mechanisms of a microwave? There’s no need to know how every piece of technology works, that would be way too much to understand. These guys excel at gaming, being good at games doesn’t require you to understand how their pc works, how their keyboard and mouse works, how their controller works, the internet they’re playing on, the electricity that powers it all.
@pofruin I would know if drinking beer was part of my job. The problem is they lack the knowledge of their devices when said devices allow them to make their career happen.
3:45 a normal cheat tool would not do this ? False. I remember clearly back in the CS 1.3-1.6 days that some hacks displayed advertisements like that after each kill or other event. You can't say tha tcheats don't do that. They sometimes do/did. Most of the times they don't since the largest percentage of cheaters are trying to hide that they're cheating and even the rage hackers sometimes want to keep their hack a secret if it's good.
These guys cheat and destroyer2009 etc decided to use them as advertising platforms.
Imagine that: players/athletes that are amongst the best are found cheating/doping all the times.
Crazy I know.
Lol
This was a good interface... A dev, A dev/hacker and a pro player... such a good conversation.
Dude as a fellow security professional, I would LOVE to see more content like this from you. Your knowledge and experience is fascinating and I wanna hear more!
A bit strange to see DZ with a window pop up labeled TSM and imperialHal's video his team has TSM in it. Coincidence?
This was really interesting as someone with a tertiary knowledge of security by being in low level IT. It opens my eyes to that there's a lot I can learn about the cyber sec part of IT
It was genuinely a breath of fresh air being able to hear all sides come together to have open dialogue and discussion about what the problem is, and how each side can play a part in fixing it. Discovering unique similarities because at the end of the day, they share the same goal for wanting games to thrive and succeed.
the thing where the guy is getting chased by bots, my immediate assumption would be that its just a bunch of real game clients, all logged into different accounts, running cheat software that automatically chases players. now, as for how they all got into the same game as the streamer... idk
the game is free, tf2 had a similar thing going on where you could run a bunch of clients off one machine
it was so cool to hear two of my worlds colliding weigh in on both the dev side and the player side on the issues that Apex has been going through. thanks for the video!
there is one thing you haven't considered yet.
apex has shit protection, in the past year and further people where able to DDOS entire lobbies.
and this shit goes even further with respawn to what has happened to the Titanfall series
where Titanfall one had a bot net that was spamming commands to crash servers and Titanfall 2 had a bot net that had access to the actual servers themselves and forcibly closing them without the need of a bot being in that lobby.
hell Northstar, titanfall 2's community server platform that was made by the community had the same problem people are speculating apex to have, and we still don't know if it was a mistake on the Northstar devs or a mistake on respawn.
btw the reason i bring this up is that apex legend runs on the exact same software as Titanfall 2, in fact most exploits for apex often get discovered on Titanfall 2 first
edit: to add on to the titanfall 2 ddos bots, it was definitely server sided because it also affect console servers on both xbox and playstation
Good point, I was hoping this would have been touched on at least. It seems like they must be linked somehow in terms of vulnerabilities.
My Steam and EA Play got hacked because of Apex (a chinese using wallhacks..). Steam Guard not even triggered and they only recovered my account cuz the he/she hacked the account again while I was chatting with the Support. Now I have 2FA on EA App but still very weird that he/she was able to get into my account and access Apex. (I didn't clicked or downloaded anything sus...)
There has a been a long running vulnerability I've seen in other games where if the game implements voice chat over Steam, you can get the player's SteamID and somehow use that to obtain an IP address. No idea how that vuln works, but people have used it to DDOS me in the past. Someone showed me how to play the game disconnected from Steam to prevent the attack.
@@exmello probably a server issue, Voice chat tends to run on another server disconnected from the game, so devs put let protections on it since it can't actually connect to gameplay
Big jump in logic from ddosing to RCE. ddosing entire lobbies sounds like fine security as that means they're attacking the server not the other players.
bruh i have never known about kernal level anti-cheat till thor started talking about it with helldivers even tho i have a few games with it and im pretty angry about that they just do that knowing that i have no clue about what they are doing and the access im giving
1:23:26 On radio silence being bad, Last Epoch was a good recent example. The launch week was an absolute mess, the servers were on fire, but you had the CEO of EHG talking in the general chat of a 200,000 member discord channel getting information and reassuring people. Compare it to D4, you couldnt imagine Rod Fergusson for example having open conversation while things are going wrong
Helldivers 2 as well, CEO has been very active, taking feedback and giving updates on Server issues status in real time, it really helped me stick through the bad launch to hear they were working on it and making progress in real time
He was not in general chat, that was the art producer. The mods were deleting messages that flamed them for being radio silent between server crashes. They are still radio silent on alot of issues.
the like "zombie mode" that was created reminds me of people using CE back in good ol' Dark Souls 2 to edit effects, movesets, and spells heavily and invade pvp gank hosts who were streaming as "boss invaders". It's neat but also spooky.
I never even got any of the fun boss invaders
All I ever got was a guy with a Avelin that instantly broke all my gear and gave me maximum curse 😢
What would be funny is if the hack maker intended to expose a player during the competition. But then it turned out multiple players had the hack, resulting in multiple people being compromised, and it all happened at the same time.
It was great that you were able to have the Apex pro on the stream and talk to them and see their take and perspective. They did a good job of illustrating their feelings and perceptions of the game and talking through the situation. I am glad we were able to see it.
Insanely quality conversation... I enjoyed every second of it and learned so many new things...