Several players are reporting breaches of their Apex Legends accounts, resulting in some accounts being permanently disabled -- and victims suspect an EA employee or serious breach at the company.
It's an exciting time for Apex Legends. Season 11 and a new legend are arriving next week, the Shadow Royale event has returned to close out Season 10, and Respawn most recently fixed some majorly annoying bugs and increased the security of servers. However, things haven't been going well for a small portion of players who are saying that someone is repeatedly breaking into their Apex Legends accounts.
Who is Breaking Into Apex Legends Accounts?
Several recent submissions to the Apex Legends subreddit and elsewhere report mysterious breaches into players' Apex Legends accounts. That's not particularly surprising -- account breaches do happen every now and again, after all. What is surprising, however, is that this apparent hacker is somehow able to circumvent account resets, ultimately leading to some accounts being permanently disabled.
Take the most recent Reddit submission as an example - /u/karankhushalani reports that he found his account had been breached and reset it. After spending roughly 30 minutes resetting everything, he discovered that his account was taken over again almost immediately. This same player showed apparent conversations with the hacker over discord.
Another player named /u/ItzMalk reported a similar problem late last week. In this particular case, he got advice from several people to make his account as secure as possible and even that was not enough to prevent additional breaches.
"But I went above and beyond what anybody could be reasonably asked to do, and it still wasn't enough," read the captions of a video posted by the affected gamer.
According to /u/ItzMalk, he activated two-factor authentication, randomly generated account passwords, wiped his PC, sign out his accounts everywhere aside from his PC and phone, and more. Still, these countermeasures were not enough and his account was broken into again -- and he says that ultimately resulted in EA permanently disabling his account.
These aren't the only incidents, mind -- a pair of players (first Reddit submission, second Reddit submission) reported similar issues earlier this month: their accounts get breached, they lock it down by changing passwords and activating two-factor authentication, and it gets broken into again.
Some of the affected players are reporting that IP addresses from China are tied to the breach, leading to the theory that there is a backdoor into EA's system that is being exploited by someone. Titanfalll 2 and Apex Legends seemed to have some serious security problems based on a series of hacks allegedly caused by a former member of the "Save Titanfall" community, so this is certainly a possibility.
Today's post by /u/karankhushalani, however, insinuates that a rogue EA employee may be behind the scheme. This wouldn't be entirely unprecedented, either -- earlier this year, a rogue EA employee was accused of selling rare "Icon Moments" for FIFA 21 by abusing developer powers.
There's no way to know for certain what's happening with these accounts. The issue seems limited to a handful of unlucky players for now; hopefully, Respawn and EA can figure out what the heck is going on and make everything right for these Apex Legends gamers.
Have you ever had one of your gaming accounts breached? Have you ever had issues getting an account back from a game's support system? Let us know in the comments below!
