It looks like Denuvo Anti-Tamper may be the latest casualty of software pirates’ unending quest for free stuff. A digital rights management (DRM) tool, Denuvo is designed to prevent users from copying or tampering with protected programs, and for a time it looked like the software might be uncrackable. In fact, earlier this year the founder of well-known Chinese hacker group 3DM predicted that “in two years time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world.” Thanks to recent development, it looks like that may no longer be the case.

The first chink in Denuvo’s armor appeared over the weekend when a hacker known as “Voksi” managed to bypass the DRM on Doom by exploiting a loophole offered by the game’s demo.

“Somehow he found out about this exploit,” Royalgamer06, a colleague of Voksi, told TorrentFreak. “At first, he couldn’t believe it himself. But after several tests it really worked. And then he got really excited and released it. This got the whole piracy community excited, which motivated Voksi even more.”

After discovering the exploit with Doom, Voksi managed to replicate his success with several other games, including Return of the Tomb Raider, Just Cause 3, Homefront: The Revolution, Abzu, Inside, and Total War: Warhammer.

While Voksi’s exploit manages to bypass Denuvo and make several pirated games playable, it is not a true crack of the DRM. For some time, Denuvo appeared to actually be uncrackable, but thanks to another hacker group, CONSPIR4CY, that may no longer be true.

CONSPIR4CY recently released a compromised version of Return of the Tomb Raider that managed to fully crack Denuvo’s controls on the game without the need to bypass the software. The group’s success spells bad news for Denuvo and for DRM programs in general, and it proves that calling your program “uncrackable” is only going to make hackers try even harder to prove you wrong.

“Denuvo’s reputation will get crushed at this rate for sure,” Royalgamer06 said. “First they let this big [Voksi] exploit happen and now their infamous protection gets fully cracked by CONSPIR4CY. Seems like there really is no way to beat piracy.”

Photo by perspec_photo88