The game Resident Evil 7 with the vaunted protection Denuvo hacked in 5 days

“Oh, yes, really!”, “The“ impenetrable ”Denuvo” did not last long, “For every cunning woman ... there is a bolt with a left-hand thread.” These comments are full of discussion threads on torrent tracker forums, where on January 29, 2017, distribution of the freshly broken PC version of Resident Evil 7 game began: Biohazard [Steam-Rip] [RUS / ENG / MULTI13] (2017) (1.0) with a volume of 22.88 GB Players assume that publishers have earned good money over the past five days "on the most impatient."

Many people remember the days when the protection of games practically did not exist. All games broke instantly and began to spread freely almost from the first day after the official release. That was before the advent of advanced anti-piracy technology against the Austrian company Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH , which protects executable files from reverse engineering, debugging, and making changes.

Denuvo Anti-Tamper was talked about the anti-unauthorized hacking technology in detail in November 2014 because of the suspicion that it corrupts users' SSD drives due to the continuous encryption and decryption cycle of the content. This causes constant reading and writing of information on the SSD and, as a result, accelerated degradation of the drive.

It was a good attempt to "dissolve" the company for additional information, but failed. Denuvo representatives replied that the technology “does not permanently decrypt and encrypt information, otherwise there would be no point in it”. But she refused to disclose exactly how the system works.
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Unlike traditional DRM systems, Denuvo Anti-Tamper technology does not have specific flaws: it does not require constant online, does not impose any special restrictions on the number of activations of the equipment and allows you to play on any device where it was downloaded and installed.

But soon the situation moved from a dead end. In December 2014, the first news came from the Chinese hackers from the 3DM team about hacking the 64-bit version of protection. Hackers said that the 64-bit encryption machine Denuvo generates a unique cryptographic key, taking into account various information about the hardware configuration. Almost a month later, there was a crack for Dragon Age: Inquisition with the protection of Origin Online Access DRM, which uses Denuvo Anti-Tamper technology.



According to experts, the publisher was quite satisfied with such a long hacking period, because the lion's share of the game’s sales falls on the first 30 days. But then the matter stalled. Soon there were reports that the Chinese hackers refused to hack the AAA title Just Cause 3 because of too much difficulty. There were concerns that Denuvo technology is really too complicated for reverse engineering. In the second half of 2016, another hacker group CONSPIR4CY (CPY) posted a Denuvo hack into the network in the form of a crack for the Rise of the Tomb Raider game, which no longer requires Steam at all. Although it was done five months after the release, it was a turning point. Hackers managed to still pick up the keys to protection.

In just a few days, CPY hacked the protection of the game Inside in the same way, but only six weeks have passed since the release. Further games fell massively: Doom , Mirror's Edge Catalyst , Deus Ex: Mankind Divided , Watch Dogs 2 and so on.

And on January 29, 2017, a control shot in the head of Denuvo took place. Just five days after the official release of the game Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (01/24/2017), the CPY group posted the hacked version on the top website - and in a matter of hours it spread across all popular torrent trackers.


Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

In defense of Denuvo, one can say that she never positioned her technology as “impenetrable”. On the contrary, the management of the company in the comments said that any protection could eventually be hacked. The main goal of Denuvo was to expand the “window” between the official release of the game and the release of the crack, so that the publisher received the maximum possible profit. For more than two years, Denuvo Anti-Tamper successfully coped with the task, and the aforementioned Just Cause 3 game has not been cracked yet. Probably, except for the hackers from CPY, no one can say why this game can not be cracked just like the rest. But it is clear that with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard this blunder did not happen. Currently, thousands of seed are already in the distribution.

With a 5-day protection indicator, Denuvo Anti-Tamper technology can be safely buried. If everyone knows that the crack will be released in a few days, then this is practically the same thing as publishing a game without any protection at all. Those who have money for the game will buy it anyway. And the rest will play for free immediately after the release or wait a few days.

The co-founder of Denuvo said that the company does not return money to game publishers in the event of a copy protection hack, so the latter have a voluntary choice: to continue to pay for this almost useless technology or not.

In the case of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, no one knew that the crack would appear so quickly, so that publishers could make good money in five days. But in future games such a “freebie” for copyright holders will no longer exist, since everyone has now learned about the hacking of Denuvo. Unfortunately, in the long run this may lead to a decrease in the number of games for the PC platform.