Denuvo 申请传唤 Valve、Discord 与 Reddit 以识别黑客 voices38

Denuvo, a common digital rights management layer that publishers often license for use in major PC game releases, has been having a rough year as more and more of its once-"uncrackable" game security has been defeated more consistently beyond occasional one-off situations. Now Denuvo is attempting to find the person the company believes is responsible for these breaches and is asking the U.S. district court for the Northern District of California to force Valve, Discord, and Reddit to tell it more.

In September, Denuvo filed a DMCA anti-circumvention lawsuit in U.S. federal court against a hacker that goes by the username "voices38." In a complaint obtained by Torrentfreak, Denuvo accused voices38 of bypassing its technology on 26 games, and doing so in a way that fundamentally compromises the way Denuvo works.

As voices38 is releasing "cracks" not just for new titles but also older ones, it appears that the anonymous hacker has discovered how to structurally undermine Denuvo's DRM, thus threatening to blow the entire service open.

After the complaint, Denuvo would have to use it as a springboard to obtain more information on voices38, who is not known to Denuvo beyond that screenname (Denuvo's lawyers even admit to not knowing if it is an individual or a group). As of this week, Denuvo has taken that next step, and is asking a California federal court for permission to subpoena Discord, Valve, and Reddit for all of those services' information on voices38.

All that is left is for a judge to decide whether those subpoenas can proceed.

The iron wall of Denuvo's security DRM has been splitting for much of the year, with titles like Resident Evil Requiem, Stellar Blade, 007 First Light, and Doom: The Dark Ages being cracked either at release or relatively close to launch date. Considering Denuvo maintains a policy of non-refunds if their security is beaten, the seeming consistent defeat of its DRM threatens to make the entire product useless to video game publishers and developers, opening releases new and old to fresh vectors for piracy that they had paid to prevent.

The DRM itself is controversial, as numerous players on PC—many of whom are cheerleading the ongoing efforts to crack the DRM open—believe it is empirically evident that Denuvo compromises the performance of the video games and wish to see it removed entirely.

As far as voices38 goes, the masked hacker continues to post on Reddit, simply commenting "All is fine. Everything will continue as normal."

About the Author

Contributor

Imran Khan has been in the games industry in various forms for over two decades. He has been a former senior editor at Game Informer, a professional loudmouth at Kinda Funny, and news director at Fanbyte. He has also been doing PR for Vicarious PR and Head of U.S. PR for Japanese VR studio MyDearest, in addition to Producer work on their latest title Brazen Blaze.