author: Bart Swiatek
Empress Arrested for Cracking Denuvo?
It looks like Empress - the woman responsible for cracking the Denuvo anti-piracy security measures in Red Dead Redemption 2 and Immortals: Fenyx Rising, among others - has been arrested.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- Cracker known as Empress could have been arrested;
- The woman was responsible for cracking several recent versions of Denuvo;
- The source of the information is a post published by Empress on Reddit, but some people don't believe it to be true.
It looks like the person responsible for cracking the last few versions of Denuvo, the anti-piracy system used in among others Immortals: Fenyx Rising - known by the nickname Empress - may have been arrested by the police. The cracker informed about it in a thread on Reddit, accusing the community of one of the subreddits and several other people from the piracy "scene" of revealing her data.
"Thanks to fitgirl, masquerade, and all the beautiful nontoxic community here, some serious people ON REDDIT managed to report me to authority with my real address, I am not quite sure how it happened, but even with putting my philosophical side aside, I think I pissed off the entire internet just by trying to control "MY" own crack for 24 hour is actually something I am still not able to believe," the cracker wrote.
The entry refers to the conflict between Empress and other crackers, about which GGMania wrote in more detail. The woman accused the people she mentioned of - ironically - distributing "her work" (i.e. cracks) on their websites. In order to curb these practices, she even decided to limit the download speed of one of the cracked games (Immortals: Fenyx Rising), which - as you can guess - was not appreciated by "ordinary" pirates.
Interestingly, some time ago Empress began openly accepting monetary donations (in cryptocurrencies) for defeating the security features of certain games. Commenting on her conflict with other pirates in an interview for Wired, the cracker left no doubt as to the source of her dislike of so-called "repackers" (people who repackage cracked games, usually in such a way as to make the installation files take up as little space as possible) - it was obviously about money.
"If not for my plan here, everybody would already be shouting: ‘fitgirl you are AWESOME! everyone just should know ‘Who’ is actually responsible of the cracks, and also to support and donate to the person who did the REAL work," said the woman.
It's worth noting that some Reddit users don't believe Empress' statement. They point out that this is not how the police operate.
"That's how police work! They call you beforehand, then let you write a long letter blaming everyone for your own stupidity (i.e. Wired interview), then put you behind bars in an hour. Yes, yes, we believe you 100%," wrote Langley404.
If Empress' arrest turns out to be true, publishers and developers of Denuvo-protected games will be able to sleep well - at least for a while.