PC game pirates begin to find cracks in Denuvo anti-piracy tech

Game developers may have been breathing a little easier this year after multiple pirating groups reported an inability to crack the newly popular Denuvo Anti-Tampering technology. It’s been used in games like FIFA 15 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, and in January the piracy group 3DM declared Just Cause 3 to be unpirateable because the software was so hard to get around. 

Unfortunately for developers employing Denuvo, Vice Gaming’s Patrick Klepek is now reporting that several different pirate groups have begun to breach the security software.

Klepek writes that over the weekend, a 19-year-old Swedish pirate who goes by Voksi uncovered a workaround for the software, and his success has driven other pirates to renew their assault in pirating protected games. 

Another hacker who goes by the name MTW tells Klepek that Voksi was able to work around Denuvo’s protections by creating a program that launches Steam, downloads a demo of Bethesda's new Doom sequel, then swaps the demo’s Steam App ID to a pirated copy of Doom already installed on the machine.

For some reason, Denuvo recognized both programs as being the same. 

Voksi says other pirates were able to apply the crack to Rise of the Tomb Raider and other games with Denuvo protection before the company closed the exploit. But in the wake of Voksi’s success, other hacking groups such as Conspiracy have come forward with new cracks for Denuvo, which fully remove the security software from pirated copies of games. 

MTW points out that Conspiracy is still struggling to crack newer versions of Denuvo at a regular rate, but Voksi’s success seemed to have revived hopes of cracking the seemingly unbeatable software.

For developers hoping that the days of worrying about piracy were beyond them, it seems the silver bullet solution has yet to arrive.