Need for Speed: Heat P2P Crack is actually a stolen CODEX one. And why it’s bad

Yesterday ShivShubh (CorePack team, currently almost non-active, so don’t blame the whole group) released a P2P crack for Need for Speed: Heat. In the attachment he has added that this crack was sent to him by some “private friend” (citing: “This crack was made possible entirely with the help from a very private friend so credits to him but his identity I will not disclose.”). Well, no.

I was happy in the beginning. I had the repack ready since the game official release, and that 16.2 GB were sitting there for 1.5 months already. I quickly verified the crack files and then ran it on three PCs I have access to. On my home Windows 7 it worked. But on the other two Windows 10 PCs it crashed after a few seconds in the task manager. That was strange. I’ve experienced similar behavior before, with older DeltaT cracks, CPY’s Octopath Traveler, some CODEX cracks. It always ment Denuvo triggers in place.

And then I took a closer look at the crack files itself. And they looked very familiar to all latest CODEX Denuvo cracks. Yep, even the main crack file has the denuvo64.dll as a name and it is almost the same size as last CODEX Borderlands 3 crack. But that doesn’t mean anything, right? Wrong. If you open that DLL in CFF Explorer and go to Exports table, you will see a phrase “DenuvoIsFinished”, which is a CODEX “watermark” for all of their D cracks. You can find it in the said BL3 crack as well.

What is different though is the compressibility of those files. NFSH dll can be compressed to less than 100 KB, while other CODEX cracks are almost uncompressible due to custom protection/compression they use to protect their Denuvo findings from competitive groups and Irdeto, the owner of Denuvo.

Just to be 100% sure I asked a few renowned members of cs.rin.ru about that crack (who know stuff about cracks, debugging and so on) – they all confirmed my suspicions. So currently the situation looks like this to me.

CODEX did their crack on November 15 (timestamp on a file) and started testing it. It’s a major group, they have to have at least a dozen of testers on different setups to check their cracks. It’s almost a New Year now – 1.5 months has passed. The only reason of them NOT releasing this crack is a bad state of it. Not working on two of my machines just confirms the theory.

Unfortunately, one of their testers wasn’t as good as they thought. And he/she leaked outside the group. I don’t know when it happened, but the tester who did it is a complete fucking idiot.

Not only he leaked what had to stay private, but he leaked the unprotected crack. Which is now in hands of Denuvo engineers – and trust me, they are not dumb, they will make all their best to NOT allow those methods to work anymore. So, my dear tester idiot and ShivShubh (who confirmed that he shared that crack with COREPACK TESTERS before releasing the crack to public). You both just made Denuvo stronger. And nobody will tell when CODEX or CPY or anyone else will make their Denuvo cracks again, if ever.

Congratulations.

Nobody did better job for this DRM than you two. You can now go and apply for a position in Irdeto.

And you, my fellow pirates, let’s just hope that anti-Denuvo war will continue after that huge blow. But don’t expect miracles now. Even if it’s a New Year Eve. And yes, even if the crack would be perfect, after I’ve discovered it’s been stolen I would never make a repack based on it. Yep, I’m not a scene, but without those guys repackers are nothing and every single group deserves respect for their efforts.