Apex Legends

Apex Legends is the free-to-play battle royale from Respawn Entertainment, launched February 2019 and published by Electronic Arts. Built on a heavily modified branch of Valve's Source engine that Respawn carried forward from Titanfall 2. Squads of three pick from a roster of Legends with distinct movement and abilities, and drop into a shrinking map. Windows builds ship two game executables: the original r5apex.exeProcessr5apex.exeApex Legends game executable (DirectX 11 / legacy build)Open plate → and a newer DirectX 12 client, r5apex_dx12.exeProcessr5apex_dx12.exeApex Legends game executable (DirectX 12 build)Open plate →, which the launcher selects between.

Install Apex through Steam or the EA app; both ship EACAnti-cheatEasy Anti-Cheat (EAC)Easy Anti-Cheat is one of the most widely deployed kernel anti-cheats in PC gaming. Founded by Finnish company Kamu in 2006, acquired by Epic Games in 2018, and bundled with Epic Online Services. The kernel driver loads while a protected game is running. User-mode daemons EasyAntiCheat.exe and EasyAntiCheat_EOS.exe are catalogued in the Field Guide's processes section.18 games in this family → as part of the install. The kernel driver is present on the system and loads during play. Use a unique password and turn on two-factor authentication on the EA account, since that login is the recovery surface for the game and the storefront. Linux and Steam Deck users should know multiplayer is currently blocked by Respawn's EAC configuration.

Apex Legends ships with Easy Anti-Cheat, the kernel-mode anti-cheat that also protects Fortnite, The Finals, Halo Infinite, and a hundred-plus other titles. EAC's kernel driver loads when an EAC-protected game launches and unloads when the last protected game closes, so it is resident only during play, not at boot. The user-mode daemons (easyanticheat.exeProcesseasyanticheat.exeEasy Anti-Cheat user-mode serviceOpen plate → and easyanticheat_eos.exeProcesseasyanticheat_eos.exeEasy Anti-Cheat for Epic Online Services (EOS variant)Open plate →) are catalogued in the Field Guide's processes section. Respawn layers its own server-side detection on top of EAC, including ban waves that target statistical outliers. Linux players on Steam Play are blocked from Apex multiplayer because Respawn has EAC's Linux compatibility disabled for this title.

In March 2024, the North American finals of the Apex Legends Global Series were postponed mid-tournament after attackers compromised the game clients of pro players ImperialHal and Genburten in real time, pushing wallhack and aimbot overlays onto their screens during broadcast matches. BleepingComputer, PC Gamer, and GameSpot covered the incident; Epic publicly stated there was no remote-code-execution vulnerability in EAC, and the root cause was never confirmed in public. An earlier wave of EAC false-positive bans was reported in August 2022, and Linux players have reported repeated ban issues into 2023. EA's broader history with player accounts includes the 2011 PSN-era credential exposure that affected many EA logins, so account hygiene is worth taking seriously on its own terms.