DenuvOwO, one of the main groups behind the recent wave of Denuvo bypasses on PC, has reportedly disbanded. A member confirmed it when asked, without giving a reason. On the piracy scene, the exit is being linked to the lawsuit Denuvo filed against the cracker voices38.
What happened
DenuvOwO made its name with a hypervisor-based bypass of the protection. According to Tom's Hardware, the group released more than 60 games using this method. News of the breakup spread on September 28: first on Reddit and X, then iXBT Games, GameRiv and Tom's Hardware picked it up. At the same time the CS.Rin forum, one of the scene's hubs, removed links to all of the group's releases and banned some of its members.
The lawsuit itself is not aimed at DenuvOwO. Denuvo, owned by Irdeto, filed it on September 14 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against voices38, over bypassing the protection in 26 games. We covered the case: the company does not know who voices38 is and is using the court to get data from the platforms where he has accounts. That is apparently why the scene has started to hide: Irdeto is knocking on every service where it might find a trail. Voices38 himself wrote after the lawsuit that everything is fine and work will continue as normal.
Why these bypasses are risky for players themselves
Hypervisor bypasses come at a price that release notes rarely mention. According to TorrentFreak, for them to work you have to switch off almost all of Windows' kernel-level protection.
- Driver signature enforcement. Without it, the unsigned hypervisor driver can load into the system.
- VBS and memory integrity. This is the same protection we looked at in our Windows 11 guide: it stops malicious code from settling into the kernel.
- Secure Boot. The first of these bypasses, for Resident Evil Requiem for example, required turning it off or installing the EfiGuard bootloader, which runs unsigned code before Windows even starts.
The homemade hypervisor then runs below the Windows kernel and gets more control over the system than any ordinary driver. If something extra is slipped into a release, the system has nothing left to defend itself with. Irdeto, for its part, has promised a countermeasure against this method.
Sources
DenuvOwO's breakup, the number of games and the CS.Rin purge: Tom's Hardware, iXBT Games and GameRiv, September 28, 2026. The lawsuit against voices38 and voices38's reply: TorrentFreak, case 5:2026cv10423 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. What has to be disabled for hypervisor bypasses and Irdeto's promise: TorrentFreak.
Images: Resident Evil Requiem, official Steam screenshots.
