I looked for any other posts on this as I would have thought someone would have posted it. Forum search is still crap though, let me know if this has been covered. Anyway, in case anyone's interested:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/28/watch_dogs_pirate_gamers_botnet/

To be honest I'm surprised it has taken this long.

I thought that was fake (since the first thing I saw of this was a 4chan posting), but even then I still think it's kind of funny.

Probably should've installed a Dogecoin miner virus on their computers.

I'd guess if this is fiction, it was seeded by the game devs as a counter to all of the people posting that they are getting half the fps that they expect in this supposedly optimized game.

I'm not so sure it's a fake. I've long thought that there was an untapped market there for the less scrupulous of software devs. It would be easy to do, and there's a genuine pay off from doing it.

Considering that Reloaded was the one to release it, a release from Skidrowcrack without the "PROPER" tag does seem quite fishy. Not to mention that the group is Skidrow, not Skidrowcrack. Would love to see where it originated though, and whether there will be any repercussions for it.

Interesting times it seems.

I think we have two separate concepts of "fake" here. There's the question of whether the story is a fake, and if not, then there's the question of whether the torrent was released from a genuine source. I was referring to the former, but both are interesting questions.

The article you linked has a cached page in KAT with the torrent in question, uploaded by a "verified" uploader (which basically means someone vouched for him), but the torrent is currently deleted. So the bitminer in the torrent is probably true. If by "genuine source" you mean a scene group, then no. There are places where the nfos of releases get dumped, and the one for Watch Dogs is by Reloaded. Knowing how scene releases get distributed though (assuming it hasn't changed in the last 8 years or so), it does beg the question of where the Skidrowcrack one originated.

Frankly I kind of like the idea of devs (at least small-time devs) being able to get some of their money back. It could be, "You can pirate my game, but by doing so you give me the right to make a few bucks off your machine." :-P

That's interesting, thanks for the insight. You mentioned that you'd like to see if there are any repercusions about the Skidrowcrack torrent, what might a repercussion be? Is there honor among thieves that I'm not aware of?

The scene does have some rules, not sure if written or unwritten. Two major ones is to respect the other groups, and not claim to be someone you are not. That is why you rarely find a release by two different groups, unless one of them fucked up somehow.
So, at this point we have a release that came out outside the scene (though there appear to have been a few more, 3DM and Steam 06), it came out on the 23rd (or 25th?), so it is possible that the scene postponed their releases since there was a release in the wild.
Next, we have someone pretending to be Skidrow, and if you recall how the GOG community reacted to imposters, you can understand why the scene may be interested in finding out the origin of the skidrowcrack release.

And last, but not least, chan. Tread lightly with chan.