Great article on API hooking!

As I was browsing RE related blogs and articles I stumbled upon this gem.

Amazing article that gave me more insight on how to perform more stealthy hooking.

Just Cause 3 and Denuvo

So apparently the same thing is happening with JC3 that happened with FIFA15 and DAI.

The founder of notorious Chinese cracking forum 3DM is warning that given the current state of anti-piracy technology, in two years there might be no more pirate games to play. The claims come after attempts to breach the Denuvo security protecting Just Cause 3 pushed the group's cracking expert to breaking point.

Do you know what drives technological innovation? Competition! Right now anti-tamper/DRM solutions are being sought because of piracy, and get broken, which forces the authors to come up with new and interesting ways to prevent their solution from being broken.

The same cannot be said from "our" side, us reverse engineers. Most people keep their tools private and we have a stagnation of publicly available tools to help us combat these new solutions and techniques.
Do you know why? Money, Denuvo is paid, cracking is something people do for free of charge, there is little incentive to release their internal tools or to release docs or even bother .

Until then, this "prediction" of 3DM might have some merit.

Denuvo cracked?

According to this article http://www.dsogaming.com/news/report-denuvo-drm-system-has-been-cracked/, some part of Denuvo has been cracked.

Well done 3DM. However, there is still no official crack released, I expect fake torrents to be appearing pretending to be a crack from 3DM, they will likely not be, what they will be is malicious.

But while at it, I do want to mention that when it comes to 64-bit practical RE, the tools are just now being developed. It is only in IDA 6.6 that an x64 decompiler was added, but for us mortals, we can never buy this. Personally, I am a fan of Ollydbg, but I admit it has faults and limitations, one of them being no support for x64 RE, x64dbg is trying to fix that, but it will take a long time before it is truly useful for that.

More games to use the new Denuvo DRM

Dragon Age Inquisition.

Lords of the Fallen.

And as a reminder, no there is no crack yet for FIFA15, thus there will be no crack for either of these games, till Denuvo has been researched and defeated, if at all.

Also, I have no ETA on cracks, I am not affiliated with scene groups, I am just a guy that likes RE as a hobby, but I find this protection a pain in the ass already, even though I've never worked with it.

FIFA15 and the new DRM Denuvo

So at first I speculated it had SecuROM, just like FIFA14, but then we(when I say "we" I do mean the internet) find out it has a new DRM called Denuvo and this is why there is no crack yet, it's new and it will take time for it to be studied and bypassed, and maybe the rather low chance of there being no crack at all.
It took me 30 days just to run SecuROM under a debugger, so it's not unlikely the same thing to happen with a new DRM.

I've no idea what Denuvo employs, frankly I do not care, but if it gains traction and remains uncracked, things will get "interesting".

To say this in simple words, there is no crack yet, any crack you do find googling will likely turn out to be a virus.

Addendum: The upcoming GTA V game will also use this DRM. Seems like GTA V will not use Denuvo afterall, http://www.incgamers.com/2014/11/grand-theft-auto-v-will-not-use-denuvo-drm-says-company-co-owner

SecuROM is a tough beast.

I've been battling the protection of Crysis 3 for 3 days straight, no progress whatsoever. I have olly loaded up with many different anti anti-debug plugins and none of them seem to work against SecuROM.

[8/6/2014] A small edit to clarify if it wasn't clear, I removed the EADRM protection, it was easy as pie, but at the OEP where I would've expected Crysis 3's code to start I ended up with the SecuROM code.

RELOADED/SKiDROW, if you are reading this(and it's very likely that you aren't). Am I to understand that you never managed to beat SecuROM in Crysis 3? Because SecuROM is still there in your cracks and you only exploit the license manager to make the game work.
Sorry, my ego got the best of me.