When game developer UBISoft first announced their new Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for future PC titles, it triggered the start of many debates (Is it right to ask gamers to be online even when playing single player portion of a game?) .Despite heavy criticism, UBI went on and implemented the new DRM on two of their titles; Silent Hunter 5 and Assassin's Creed 2. Much to the dismay of pirates, both these titles remain uncracked to date (that’s not counting the partially working cracks which have bugs). While pirates look desperately for a scene group to break this protection, a group calling themselves ‘IPAKI ASIAN Division’ claims to have already done so. What’s really interesting about this group is that they’ve been updating the public on their progress via microblogging service Twitter.

Since the 28th of March, Twitter account http://twitter.com/IPAKIGroup has been Tweeting messages about AC2 cracking progress. The first Tweet is directed at UBISoft itself, which claims that IPAKIGroup has broken the DRM and will be publishing a crack sin a few days. Full list of Tweets is quoted below:

@UBISOFT We have cracked Assassin's creed II successfully , We are releasing it to public after 3 days because we are sill testing it .

We are debugging assassin's creed II please wait , still many problems we face to get it 100% finished . Viva TokYO !

Missions fixed with our new crack ~ but game is stuck at 13 FPS ~ we are still fixing it

~~Settlers 7 ~~ crack will be available to public after 5 days .

~SH5 ~ too many bugs , has not been fixed yet .

~ACII~ crack will be published after 24 hours , Tokyo's time . everything is fixed and game works fine now .

~Settlers 7 ~ crack delayed , we are facing lots of bugs . We apologize for that .

~ACII~ crack will be published at 7 a.m Tokyo's time . we are putting our final touches on it , keep tuned

If what they say is true, we should see an AC 2 crack out in several hours. However, one should keep in mind that this could very well be a deliberate hoax (and it most likely is). Fake cracks and scams have always been a great way of malware distribution and this could be another such attempt, only more organized.

EDIT: Definitely looks like BS:

Oh my god dammit ! we are very sorry and that was one of our members after he had a fight with us .. we will give you the valid crack today.

Assassin's creed II crack isn't published by us yet . we apologize for that . wait some hours remaining . about 3 hours ago via web

Again we are very sorry for what had happened . we will publish it today , don't be pissed off . about 3 hours ago via web

Regardless of the fact that their DRM gets cracked or not, UBISoft has already won the battle when it comes to Assassin’s Creed 2. The new DRM (despite heavy criticism), has held pirates at bay ever since the game’s release. In a world where every game usually gets cracked before release, this is a huge achievement. However that’s not to say this DRM is unbreakable. Starforce remained uncracked for 422 days until RELOADED publicly released a set of reverse engineering tools that ripped the protection apart. No matter how advanced the protection is, someone, somewhere always finds a way.


14 Comments

  1. mitice // 4/01/2010 02:05:00 AM  

    1st april joke...

  2. Unknown // 4/01/2010 02:15:00 AM  

    Question:
    What BS means?

  3. TEAM FILEnetworks // 4/01/2010 02:52:00 AM  

    @noam,
    BS = BullShit :)

  4. iNfeRnO // 4/01/2010 03:03:00 AM  

    I just downloaded, kaspersky said it was a virus right away... I'm inclined to believe that it's not a false positive.

  5. TEAM FILEnetworks // 4/01/2010 03:16:00 AM  

    Don't download the file they've posted. It's fake and appears to contain malware (as expected lol).

  6. Unknown // 4/01/2010 03:23:00 AM  

    http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/0006d4c4344e9dc599fc4045d0fc60f597d1c34b90d1262ac7aebe43954bac6a-1270072294

    Its no good

  7. Anonymous // 4/01/2010 04:06:00 AM  

    has sality virus in it..april fools

  8. Anonymous // 4/01/2010 05:48:00 PM  
    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
  9. TEAM FILEnetworks // 4/01/2010 09:16:00 PM  

    @Mr.Shawn,
    Offering/trading GFT invites in public is prohibited by tracker rules. Hence your comment was deleted.

  10. spartan117 // 4/04/2010 10:15:00 PM  

    I am just a little confused .. you stated that silent hunter 5 was not yet cracked .. well I dl'ed it about two weeks ago and it was cracked and I finished the whole game ...

  11. spartan117 // 4/05/2010 05:17:00 AM  

    Now assassins creed 2 is cracked again and available ..

  12. Anonymous // 4/05/2010 05:23:00 AM  

    haha those who bought the game got pwned game is cracked after a month...was worth waiting

  13. Unknown // 4/07/2010 10:23:00 AM  

    In Russia there is server emulator. Works fine ;)

  14. Unknown // 4/13/2010 12:50:00 PM  

    It has also stumped off line player sales, anti-drm customers sales, and people who will sooner or later be screwed by connection issues.so if the pirates couldn't have afforded to get the game to begin with do you think they would now....no in actual real life market share those customers did not exist to begin with because they where not customers to begin with. so from a business stand point they lost big take the people who never even read the box and lost there ability to play and they find out why. strip the drm drop the price to 20$ and every person under the sun will buy it. honestly how many times can you counterfeit the same work and make cash how many do you have to sell to consider the 1 product paid for?