Denuvo files lawsuit against DRM Hacker “Voksi”

Tech security company Denuvo has started legal action against one of the popular hacking groups of the company’s premier Anti-Tampering Software. According to a statement by irdeto, parent company of Denuvo, the Bulgarian hacker known under his online alias Voksi has been arrested by Bulgarian authorities, with the hacker’s website Revolt taken down.

“Piracy is a threat that is now firmly established in the gaming industry, and we are focused on securing the content of game publishers and ensuring that hackers cannot distort the gaming environment for personal gain at the expense of other players” – Mark Mulready, Vice President, Cybersecurity Services, Irdeto

DRM has been a part of PC gaming since almost the very start. Whether it is a mere serial code, inventive physical code wheels or software solutions, publishers have always tried to make their games impossible to be played for illegal customers who pirate their games. But likewise, smart heads across the web have always found ways to circumvent these DRM or Digital Rights Management techniques.

One of these DRM tools is called Denuvo and is one of the newest and most secure anti-tamper software solutions available at the moment for the PC. Denuvo was established fairly recent, in 2014, by an Austrian company and promised  significant improvement at protecting games of being pirated. A sweet melody to the ears of publishers who have seen game piracy as a pest, harming their revenue.

Indeed, Denuvo managed to stay impenetrable for about a month when it first was used in Dragon Age: Inquisition. A month may seem not that long but games before Denuvo were usually cracked within a day and taking into account that most of a game’s revenue comes within the first 30 days, Denuvo was a success. And so, many more publishers started to license the costly DRM tool. Denuvo’s success ultimately led to it being bought by irdeto, a big Dutch cybersecurity company early this year.

While sounding like a good thing for game publishers, Denuvo quickly started to attain dislike by legal customers who bemoaned the complex DRM method of degrading game performance, necessitating regular online connection and even possibly harming SSDs. Tekken 7 director Katsuhiro Harada even admitted that Denuvo was to blame for the game’s frame-rate drops, only fueling antipathy towards Denuvo.

Hacking groups around the world weren’t accepting defeat however and steadily worked to understand and beat the Denuvo protection. In 2016 then, the situation changed drastically when Resident Evil 7, which used the newest version of Denuvo, got hacked after only five days. A blow to Denuvo’s claim of protecting critical early sales. Afterwards, it seemed like hackers had figured out Denuvo completely, with cracks releasing quickly for almost all protected games.

Surely this resulted in Denuvo loosing contracts and today, the company has started to go a more aggressive route in protecting their companies very existence. Denuvo has filed a  lawsuit against popular Denuvo hacker Voksi, in collaboration with Bulgarian authorities. In the statement of irdeto, we learn that Voksi’s home was raided by Bulgarian police, who seized servers, PC and more. Voksi himself released a short statement as well, in which he says he expected this to happen sooner or later and that he is trying to solve the situation with irdeto in a peaceful way.

It remains to be seen how irdeto is going to operate against other hackers from now on. After not being able to improve Denuvo to a higher security, legal action looks like a last effort attempt to deter further hacking attempts.