There isn’t much sandboxing in Wine, but at least on linux, the AC is forced to run in userspace (instead of having root privileges). So it’s not quite as invasive, but it still has access to everything your non-root account has access to. Which is still a lot. Probably not much better from a privacy perspective, but at least a little better from a security perspective.
The clips of the hacks being installed/activated are pretty crazy:
Note that the title has been edited: we do NOT know if this was EAC yet. The article says it “may have been.” EAC has claimed it wasn’t them (but of course they’re going to claim that). Instead, it could have been Apex’s source engine. Or, it could have been two individually compromised machines from software completely unrelated to Apex; remember, these are two high-profile targets, after all. We just have to wait and see what the real cause was. Regardless, I wouldn’t play Apex for at least the next day or two, just to be safe.