How risky is Piracy: Do cracks contain malware?

[mradamdavies]

As an old-school ex game cracker, and scene releaser, scene groups don't add malware... Shady sites do. If you just Google random downloads, you WILL have a bad time. Also; if the file has a password it's usually to protect it from antivirus detecting it as malware. Only trust respected groups and their distro channels - RIP Warez-BB.

[cyroz]

if you pirate from the right places that are known to be safe you should never have a problem

[MKE]

“The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work, It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” -Gabe Newell, 2011

This is why r/piracy, Github piracy guides, media preservation, virtual machine and common sense are the only way to keep yourself safe while pirating, and for poor people from the third world country.

[IgnacioEsteves]

I think that the video would be even more interesting if you analyzed cracks from known sources. People who know how pirating works would never download that Norton crack, for example. The real and potentiable harm behind piracy is trusting a cracker, and I would love to see a second part of this video investigating "safe piracy" in depth.

[eric-yt]

Browse the pirating community and search up who is reputable at any given moment. Torrent from them and hope all goes well. This is about the extent of being "safe".

[wolf]

The game companies invented the best anti-piracy solution. Releasing buggy unfinished games that forces user to constantly update the game. These game updates in 99% cases disables working crack. In past it was not big deal, there were 3-4 small major patches over lifetime of game, but now? You install 50 GB new game and after first launch you are waiting for download of 100 GB zero-day update.

[corumuk]

A friend of a friend said that when it comes to cracks, using a bit of common sense goes a long way, along with sourcing said cracks from more reputable sites. Googling for the crack and clicking random links is definitely not the way to go...

[GoodGooseThingit]

Hi Leo, could you please do a video on how safe VM’s are at keeping malware contained? Thanks :)

[xkiroxX]

If you can easily find it on a search engine its probably not safe.

[forrandomsites]

Funny enough, in a lot of pirate sites, the site itself isn't the risk, it's the ads that are there. And more often than not you can tell which is the download button and which is the fake one, by seeing if the button matches the ui/website style, does it have a small little "x" and "i" in the top right corner, the resolution or image quality of the download button, and how the button is animated.
But rule of thumb, is NEVER trust a piracy site that doesn't show ads, nor an option to donate, nor a means of gaining funds, and never let it download an exe to download a game instead of the game files, those likely are to be very dangerous.

[skylarkblue]

Problem with scanning cracks as well is multiple AVs actually detect the cracking tools/dlls and such as malware even though they are just cracking tools. General concensus is they're paid off to add those things to the detections but it does make it much harder to check cracks for malware.

[replikvltyoutube]

Pirates/Piracy groups have a codex they follow. If you get stuff made by them it's pretty safe. Antivirus may be triggered by crack because it's modifying memory (which some viruses did/do)

[rrdias]

3:35 Hello, can you explain what did you see in the Process Explorer window that indicated you your computer was infected? I didn't get it. Thanks a lot!

[GabrielTobing]

Most veteran crack finders know that it's all based on word of mouth.

Cracks need to sometimes have things that may seem like viruses, to actually crack the app.

Therefore it's all word of mouth to find the right ones. I've managed to find my favorite ones and have sticked with them, no issues at all with them.

Randomly searching up cracks is where the major issues lies sadly.

[kendarr]

This is NOT how must people go about this, as someone who needed to crack some stuff/games when I was younger, I'm telling you, the scene people you can trust, if one of them seem shady, they get removed from 'the scene', and that has happened before.

[dsonsuce]

Really depends on what site you use for piracy

[sc_]

hey man, what do you think about secure boot? do you think it helps with some types of malware or is just a gimmick? can you test something like that?

[AThijs]

Games are usually safe, it's software/tools like daw's, antivirus, video editing, rescaling, etc...
That are targeted the most.

[jjb]

“File password” is an immediate red flag for me.

My theory on this is it’s in an encrypted ZIP to avoid detection by AV programs.

[leonidas]

The first red flag is when the EXE you clicked disappears.