The modern era is simultaneously exciting and scary as hell; we’re reaching a level of interconnectivity that was reserved for campy sci-fi films and fiction primers as technology looks to begin interfacing directly with the brain.
With this level of knowledge transfer available within seconds, it also greatly increases the possibility of attacks from various bad actors.
Both Ubisoft and Crytek were attacked by a group that has called themselves Egregor, from an occult term (Egregore) that represents the non-physical entity from a group of like-minded individuals.
The scene group had made their demands of both Ubisoft and Crytek, threatening to release the source code from Watch Dogs: Legion if Ubisoft did not acquiesce to their demands.
Those demands have apparently been refused, and now the source code for Watch Dogs: Legion has been leaked onto private trackers across the internet, which could very likely result in an expedited DRM crack that circumnavigated Denuvo.
This, however, isn’t something that should readily be celebrated by any group with a proverbial dog in the fight of modern DRM practices; this is far removed from the cat & mouse battles between DRM companies and scene groups, and broaches into blatant disregard of employee safety with a decent dose of cyber-terrorism.
There’s very little to be confidently stated regarding the morals of cracking DRM already, and for many that have a pseudo-rationale that piracy is similarly more grey within the spectrum of legality, this is far more than most are willing to bargain with.
A 4chan thread last night (October 3) at 2253 EST was created that showed Watch Dogs: Legion on a private tracker with a whopping 558.33 GB of data, compared to the relatively light 65GB recommend file size released by Ubisoft.
It’s presumed that the source code has multiple uncompressed files ranging from graphics to audio, resulting in the ballooning of the total package to numbers that would make Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare pale in comparison.
Fascinating screenshots of the code have been recently cropping up in social forums online, making comparisons to the arguably…unrefined state of scripting within Ubisoft. Many are comparing the visual editor to a form of Scratch, which teaches children how to use branching statements and begin tinkering with a relatively crude (yet successful) form of logic.
No. Your eyes are not deceiving you.
….This is how scripting was done in WD: Legion. pic.twitter.com/UWx1deiTfB
— PPG (@pokeprotos) November 2, 2020
It’s unlikely that much will actually come from this; the gargantuan size of the source code doesn’t bode well for transferring the files across torrents without a heft of patience, although mods could arguably come far easier if the source code can actually be compressed and packaged to more feasible file sizes.
If nothing else, it doesn’t appear too complex to interact with the code as it is currently within the package.