With piracy on the rise, copyright holders are willing to go the extra mile to protect their content. The infamous Denuvo anti-tamper technology made headlines after its developers claimed that it is uncrackable at the time of launch. However, hackers have been finding workarounds over the years fairly quickly. Recently, Valeroa anti-tamper technology was announced, and the creators claimed that it is better than Denuvo at protecting copyrighted content but unfortunately, a hacker was able to break into the DRM in just 20 minutes as reported by TorrentFreak.
Valeroa debuted with the game City Patrol: Police on November 29 with the promise of offering best in class anti-tamper technology. Just two days later after the game released, copies of the game with its protection cracked were available online. Hacker ‘Steam006’ revealed that he was able to break into the DRM in about 20 minutes and it was by no means difficult to do so.
Just like Denuvo, which has garnered a lot of bad reputation due to its impact on users’ system performance as it constantly writes data on hard drives, Valeroa does something similar. The anti-tamper DRM constantly writes data to a gamer’s hard drive. Such anti-tamper technology is available for games only, and music and movie businesses have not been able to come up with a solution yet outside of targeting distributors of pirated content.
The new DRM also has a unique quirk that makes it easier to crack after a pre-determined period. Denuvo’s creators stated in the recent past that piracy is inevitable and all a DRM can hope to do is delay incoming jailbreaks to protect initial sales of games and software. It remains to be seen how quickly the DRM implements changes for its upcoming releases and its disastrous debut might put off potential investors.
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