Halo Reach Leaked To Filesharing Sites

Stoobalou writes "What appears to be the full version of Bungie's Halo Reach game has turned up on a number of file sharing sites. The hotly-anticipated multi-player shooter had been hosted on a private area of the Microsoft Live site in order for journalists to preview the release, but Microsoft has admitted that a security breach has meant that pirates have been able to bypass personal download codes given to writers. Disk images of the game are now appearing on a number of public torrent and P2P sites as well as on popular NZB aggregators and Usenet binaries newsgroups." The game isn't due to be released until September 14th. Microsoft is said to be "aggressively pursuing" whoever grabbed the files without their permission.

Comments

Long end of the stick.

[Anonymous Coward]

"What appears to be the full version of Bungie's Halo Reach game has turned up on a number of file sharing sites. The hotly-anticipated multi-player shooter had been hosted on a private area of the Microsoft Live site in order for journalists to preview the release, but Microsoft has admitted that a security breach has meant that pirates have been able to bypass personal download codes given to writers. Disk images of the game are now appearing on a number of public torrent and P2P sites as well as on popular NZB aggregators and Usenet binaries newsgroups."

Whew! I'm sure glad we lengthened copyright to prevent something like this.

Re:Long end of the stick.

[miggyb]

Clearly we now need copyright to extend backwards into the past, before the work is completely finished. Otherwise, how are artists like Da Vinci supposed to protect unfinished works like the Mona Lisa?

Better go after those pirates

[cheekyjohnson]

They're stealing potential profit! It's almost as bad as competition between businesses, or a consumer informing other consumers about a bad company/poorly made product. In all three cases, potential profit is being stolen.

We must stop these people from hurting our businesses. Also, this clearly wouldn't have happened if there had been super powerful DRM installed with the game!

Re:low detection rate?

[NoZart]

>>> Can anyone explain why you need a JTAG mode to play this game?

Because the game was released as an unencrypted download title. This way, you can not generate a working ISO to burn from it, as you don't know which way to encrypt it to match the release discs.

>>> JTAG mode allows you to unban your console (by changing the ID)

Yeah, but you need an existing keyvault from an unbanned XBox to do that, so this method is highly impractical.
The workaround for JTAGs to use this leak is more along the lines playing the games over Xlink Kai, a LAN-tunneling service, which will provide a crappy gameplay experience. /Tinfoil hat on/
The way this was leaked (only works on JTAGs which are few and gimped multiplayer and MP is the main draw of the game) makes me think that it is possible this is intentional. All the Youtube clips showing ingame details work perfectly as some sort of guerilla marketing to amp up the hype. /Tinfoil hat off/

Re:Come after me, Microsoft...

[TheJokeExplainer]

Uh. I am at a real loss on how to explain this.

-Joke Explainer

Re:Come after me, Microsoft...

[TheCarAnalogyGuy]

Yeah, it's like a... when you roll down the windows and....

I Got nothin

~TheCarAnalogyGuy

Re:'aggressive' waste of time

[d3ac0n]

Actually, if you RTFA, the attackers used a vulnerability in the website hosting the code to break in and BYPASS the journalist login feature. So technically, no reporters are gonna get sued since none of them did anything wrong.

Let's be honest, the real problem here was that MS was using the "Security by Obscurity" model to hide the test code site. It even says ITA that it was a "secret" website. (As if a website could EVER be secret for long, especially one connected to Microsoft.) The fact that anyone at MS still thinks that security by obscurity is wise reveals that despite all of the improvements in Win7, There is an ingrained culture in MS that still doesn't get it.