Rise of the Tomb Raider and Denuvo Have Reportedly Been Cracked

Denuvo's anti-tamper technology has caused quite a stir since its appearance on the video gaming scene in the past couple of years, even leading some to opine that pirated games will no longer exist in the near future. But it seems now that may have been an overstatement, with multiple breaches reported in the last few days.

The first of those happened over the weekend, according to TorrentFreak, as a Bulgarian hacker going by the name of Voksi managed to find a loophole in Steam that allowed users to play games such as Abzu, Doom, Homefront: The Revolution, Inside, Just Cause 3, and Total War: Warhammer. Even as the exploit used was patched by the Denuvo team on Monday, around 650,000 people had used Voksi's method during that time.

Just after, news came in that a piracy group known as CONSPIR4CY had managed to fully crack the latest Lara Croft game, Rise of the Tomb Raider. Unlike the Steam exploit being used in the first method, this is a complete release and is available as a 26.8GB download on file-sharing sites globally. In the release notes, the team mentioned "Steam+Denuvo" under the protection label and that their pirated copy contains all three pieces of downloadable content.

It's not clear at this point how the hacker managed to bypass Denuvo protection, and whether this can be used on other Square Enix games that make use of Denuvo such as Just Cause 3 and the new Hitman, or on titles from other publishers like EA's Need for Speed and the FIFA franchise.

Back in February, Chinese hacking group 3DM had said that they were close to an announcement of their own but they have been quite ever since. With CONSPIR4CY managing the previously unthinkable, expect Denuvo to hit back in this never-ending war of attrition.