Who Really Cracked UBISoft’s DRM? SKIDROW, Razor1911 Or DORMINE?

Notice anything wrong with the title of this post? It has too many names of release groups. Let that be a warning for you – this article features a lot of e-drama from the cracking scene :p. In one of our previous posts a couple of days ago, we quoted SKIDROW when they claimed to have cracked UBISoft’s new DRM. SKIDROW in their release NFO claimed to actually have removed the DRM as opposed to using a workaround or more specifically an emulated server environment. Although the P2P community questioned SKIDROW’s claims, they re-iterated their stance even when they released a CRACKFIX for Assassin's Creed 2. Now, several days later, SKIDROW finds themselves again in the line of fire – this time they are accused of stealing logged server responses used for the Emu server. At a glance, the accuser seems to be none other than DORMINE who did the lion’s share of work when it came to building the emulated server. But this isn’t exactly true.

It ain’t the REAL dormine!

Yesterday, the NFO Assassins_Creed_2_READNFO_ONLY-DORMINE was pre’d on scene channels. Initially it looked like a legit notice pre’d by the creator of the Emu server himself. However, this isn’t actually true. Here’s what the real DORMINE wrote on CS.RIN.RU forums (which have been his official home for quite a while):

I see someone has posted a "Assassins_Creed_2_READNFO_ONLY-DORMINE" nfo to the scene. Let me for the record state that I did not create that nfo, and don't know what the hell they're on about. Dormine isn't a group, it's just me.
Regarding this whole Skidrow thing, I don't really care about them using the values from here if it means the crack came out a week or two sooner since they didn't have to collect messages themselves. It would have been worse if they had extra values in there that they didn't share on the forum instead.

The flaming NFO

Be that as may, the NFO pre’d earlier trashes SKIDROW pretty badly. It even criticizes their cracks for other protections including SecuROM, SolidShied and Starforce. You can read the full NFO below:

BEGIN QUOTE - Assassins_Creed_2_READNFO_ONLY-DORMINE

First of all we would like to thank all people out there that helped us beating ubisofts DRM for Assassins Creed 2.

Now to the points of Skidrow which someone pasted us after the scene nuked their theft of our work.

1. You are true about how the orbit works BUT you did not even log a single value yourself. This is easy proofable to all people that would like to take the time and start logging from the very beginning. Alot of values, which you recieve while logging we merged in our database together into 1 or 2 lines Like 5 values 1 line but if you log them yourself, they will never look like the given ones from our value.db. Also there are some values which do not exist in your released version of AC2. They are russian only!

2. Of course we are not stupid and tagged our value.db. There are several values inside that you can never log because they simple do not exist. They are fake and used to tag our work from stealing. I will not mention which one but as a hint it will be transformed a greeting to ru forums as thanks for all our supporters there logging values.

3. The way you transformed the orbit is not good. If you want to play any orbit game like Silent Hunter 5 or Settlers 7 or SPlinter Cell you can not play them anymore even though you bought them. The Skidrow crack fuxks up all originals you want to play. How stupid is this "leading force"

4. Just for your info: Settlers 7 will be also tagged with values that you can never recieve from the orbit. You might understand how the orbit works but you will never understand how cracking works because you steal almost everything.

Let me proof this:

• Securom cracks: These "cracks" you supplied had never ever the securom VM applied. They even still include the debug codes from the times before mastering
• Starforce cracks: Your cracks are lame. They are made of russian cracks and often wrong rebuilt cause russian code is different to european code or you simple have access to another unproteced exe that was never protected by starforce.
• Solidshield cracks: Your unprotected exes are super great

5. Steam cracks: Your steam cracks are done exactly the way of our russian RE forum. Its ok as its a tutorial but if there is something new your fix arrives directly after our forum serves the fix. Guess the rest.

6. next Ubisoft game: Oh yeah. Silent Hunter 5 without even testing! wow. Settlers 7 with incomplete values or will you wait till ours are complete?

So at final conclusion to the fuckers of Skidrow:

• Stop fucking around the real crackers if you are not able todo the job yourself. Once the greatest cracking group on Amiga and now the stupiest group on PC that steals whatever they can catch.
• Stop destroying a name you can not serve proper with your work
• Stop releasing when you can not crack yourself
• Stop talking about other groups work when you dont even understand it.
  • Reloaded dll's are simple rebuilt functions
  • Razor & Reloaded Securom cracks are not emu for the protection to be continued for all that the Skidrow fuckers do not understand.
  • Start thinking before typing bullshit in your nfos.

Greetings:

• Trivium
• ru forums for the help of logging ubisofts DRM values
• woodman.com
• Scene groups doing the work themself (if they exist)

END QUOTE

Razor1911 – WE did it properly

Albeit a little late, the latest scene group to join the UBISoft DRM crackfest is Razor1911, one of the oldest surviving scene groups who are still active after almost 25 years of operation. Razor1911 yesterday claimed to crack Settlers 7, another PC title protected by UBI DRM. RZR too hinted at SKIDROW possibly stealing server values and they claim to have released the first ever true crack for this notorious DRM. Quoted below are parts from their NFO pre’d along with Settlers 7:

BEGIN QUOTE - The_Settlers_7-Razor1911

Scene-related rants & stuff:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As far as previous 'cracks' of Ubisoft's new DRM system are concerned:

Both of Skidr0w's releases show us they haven't had a look (probably even didn't find) the actual protection code and everything hints on em using parts of publicly collected 'challenge/response' pairs. Luckily Assassin's Creed II is probably the only target ever where this approach of 'emulating' the server by a static lookup will yield any measurable success (due to a basic design flaw in an otherwise pretty neat idea of software protection). In fact, we considered this approach as
generally too unreliable and 'unworthy' of a scene crack, so we didn't care about doing it. Instead we opted for going for the arguably most challenging implementation of Ubisoft's new DRM first (emulating actual server-side game code). So here it is: The first Ubisoft DRM crack!

@RELOADED:
Congrats on your recent advances in automating your Solidshield VM cracks. We actually respect that. However, we wonder why you didn't go all the way and recompiled the fixed decompiler output to optimized native x86 code as we did as early as with Perry Rhodan (followed by Anno 1404).

Although we think there's not much merit to discussing technical details in .nfos (mostly because it's impossible for anyone lacking the skills and sources to fact-check these statements) we feel the need to preempt all that made-up "they-ripped-it-from-some-unprotected-tuvaluan-multi12-binary" bullshit that's sure to follow:

We invite anyone who is able to and interested enough in this to check the history of scene-released Solidshield VM cracks taking into account things like availability of possible alternate sources for the protected code fragments at the time of release, similarity to compiled code (i.e. 'copy & paste cracks' from differently protected or unprotected binaries), the rebuilt code's resemblence of the original VM instructions regarding sequence of mnemonics etc.pp. We're pretty confident (read '100% certain')you'll come to the conclusion that we were first with respect to rebuilding actual Solidshield VM code.

Nvm, 'mild respect'!

P.S.
Finally, there's a chance of the good ol' times coming back (when protections had to be dealt with on a per title basis by skilled individuals) and an opportunity of telling the sharpies from the fakers again. Thanks Ubi! (Yup, we're actually serious about this )

Razor 1911 Greetings
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To our demo division heroes: Your cracktro rocks (we expected no less :wink!

END QUOTE

So there you have it, different claims by different groups. Even though there are flame wars raging in the scene, this definitely isn’t a good time for UBISoft DRM. BY the number of workarounds, cracks, loaders bypassers, emulators, etc that are being built for this protection, it seems UBISoft has attracted a little too much attention and enthusiasm from the cracking community.

Related Articles

• SKIDROW Beats UBISOft DRM, Denies Hacking Claims
• Assassin's Creed 2 Crack – Have They Really Done It?
• IPAKI Group – The Aftermath
• Can’t Select Or Play Silent Hunter 5 Campaign Missions? Crash? DRM At Play

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