A coworker of mine built an LLM powered FUSE filesystem as a very tongue-in-check response to the concept of letting AI do everything. It let the LLM generate responses to listing files in directories and reading contents of the files.

Honestly, I don’t mind them adding ads. They’ve got a business to support. But, calling them “quests” and treating them as “rewards” for their users is just so tone-deaf and disingenuous. Likewise, if I’ve boosted even a single server, I shouldn’t see this crap anywhere, let alone on the server I’ve boosted.

After repeated failures to pass a test, I do not think it is unreasonable for the business to stop paying for your attempts at a certification. Either directly via training sessions and testing fees, or indirectly via your working hours.

In the US, salaried engineers are exempt from overtime pay regulations. He is telling them to work 20 extra hours, with no extra pay.

In a centralized management scenario, the central controlling service needs the ability to control everything registered with it. So, if the central controlling service is compromised, it is very likely that everything it controlled is also compromised. There are ways to mitigate this at the application level, like role-based and group-based access controls. But, if the service itself is compromised rather than an individual’s credentials, then the application protections can likely all be bypassed. You can mitigate this a bit by giving each tenant their own deployment of the controlling service, with network isolation between tenants. But, even that is still not fool-proof.

Fundamentally, security is not solved by one golden thing. You need layers of protection. If one layer is compromised, others are hopefully still safe.

If we boil this article down to it’s most basic point, it actually has nothing to do with virtualization. The true issue here is actually centralized infra/application management. The article references two ESXi CVE’s that deal with compromised management interfaces. Imagine a scenario where we avoid virtualization by running Kubernetes on bare metal nodes, and each Pod gets exclusive assignment to a Node. If a threat actor has access to the Kubernetes management interface, and can exploit a vulnerability to access that management interface, it can immediately compromise everything within that Kubernetes cluster. We don’t even need to have a container management platform. Imagine a collection of bare-metal nodes managed by Ansible via Ansible Automation Platform (AAP). If a threat actor has access to AAP and exploit it, it then can compromise everything managed by that AAP instance. This author fundamentally misattributes the issue to virtualization. The issue is centralized management and there are significant benefits to using higher-order centralized management solutions.

I’m not saying they were purposefully cheating in this or any tournament, and I agree cheating under that context would be totally obvious. But, it is feasible that a pro worried about their stats might be willing to cheat in situations where the stakes are lower outside of tournaments.

What I also don’t understand is, if this hacker has lobby wide access, why was it only these two people who got compromised? Why wouldn’t the hacker just do the entire lobby? Clearly this hacker loves the clout. Forcing cheats on the entire lobby would certainly be more impressive.

PS. This is all blatant speculation. From all sides. No one, other than the hacker and hopefully Apex really knows what happened. I am mostly frustrated by ACPD’s immediate fear mongering of a RCE in EAC or Apex based on no concrete evidence.

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This isn’t a statement from Apex or EAC. The original source for the RCE claim is the “Anti-Cheat Police Department” which appears to just be a twitter community. There is absolutely no way Apex would turn over network traffic logs to a twitter community, who knows what kind of sensitive information could be in that. At best, ACPD is taking the players at their word that the cheats magically showed up on their computers.

PS. Apparently there have been multiple RCE vulnerabilities in the Source Engine over the years. So, I’m keeping my mind open.

I do not buy this RCE in Apex/EAC rumor. This wouldn’t be the first time “pro” gamers got caught with cheats. And, I wouldn’t put it past the cheat developers to not only include trojan-like remote-control into their cheats, but use it to advertise their product during a streamed tournament. All press is good press. And honestly, they’d probably want people thinking it was a vulnerability in Apex/EAC rather than a trojan included with their cheat.