Let’s not be fooled by memes and buzz. Crackers don’t crack it to infect your computer and make money. They do it to le t others play the game. They benefit by getting to play some other game someone else has cracked and distributing. And maybe they enjoy it as it’s challenging. Cracking isn’t about infecting people’s computers. When some pirated game comes with some ransomware or trojan injected, probably it’s been done by someone else whose passion is totally different than that of the cracker. They take the crack, modify it and then redistribute it malware injected. So, maybe, by downloading popular torrents, I mean if you make sure it comes directly from the cracker group, you can avoid malware except the spyware the game manufacturer has put into it, of course.

Strangely enough I’ve found that some kid in India or Russia distributing his crack doesn’t do it to control my PC or to infect it.

Big corporations that install root kits or use hyper invasive cheat software (even when no competitive mode even exists) are far more insidious and untrustworthy.

I worry more about the hidden telemetry of big apps more than some crack being infected. Hell even MS virus scan will throw up false flags because the software just isn’t a registered dev or will quarantine an exe in error (libremonitor for example).

yes. pirated software is suprisingly secure most of the time.

im also not running windows. malware not meant for proton is gonna have a bad time working.

I mean, I pirated the Windows 10 installation on my gaming PC. Massgrave scripts helped out though, so there’s that.

That said, I’m wiping Windows soon and installing LMDE. It’s the last Windows PC in my house (minus W11 work laptop - that doesn’t count though).

When engaging in criminal activity, you have no “legal” recourse for malicious behavior, so you work on the web of trust instead.

If you can’t trust the software, nor the publisher, nor the hash verified by however many seeders, then don’t download it in the first place. Me personally, considering I install indie porn games on the regular and never once gotten a virus that I know of, I think it’s worth it to trust others.

Of course you could always go into paranoid zero trust mode but sometimes being a social being means trusting the criminal serving you free shit isn’t ratfucking your data

I personally run all my games in Bottles (flatpak) with sandboxing on. Even if a game is available for Linux I still run the Windows version inside Bottles just so it’s slightly safer.

the games I pirate are all in my Lutris app which I installed as a flatpak on Linux, so they don’t have the necessary permissions to change important files.

also I install them in the virtual C: drive, and they normally shouldn’t thouch the virtual Z: drive. I don’t think a hack would do that because installing malware on the windows drive should be enough for most people pirating games

Honestly I don’t run pirated software at all anymore. The risk is too high. If it’s a game then I’m happy to pay for it, and open source software covers pretty much everything else for me.

The only exception is switch games but they run through an emulator which is quite safe.

Most media files are safe but I’ve heard that PDFs of all files can be vectors.

My tax machine is a VM. On another server (proxmox)

Publisher matters. Some random website advertising a disk cleaning utility could be malware while a Fitgirl repack most definitely isn’t. Installing something from an official Ubuntu software repository is also pretty safe, while something from a 3rd party repository or community development library could be malware. I also generally trust PDFs from Anna’s Archive and Libgen or Internet Archive, because of the reputation loss to them if it were. You can minimize your risk to a tolerable level this way.

No, I try to treat that machine like a quarantine zone, I have a two PC setup and that’s part of the reason for it. So basically I don’t log into online accounts on that one (except relatively unimportant accounts for convenience, like Steam), and I don’t do important stuff on it

I’m running the games in Linux, using Lutris as a launcher with a default configuration that wraps them in a firejail sandbox (for anybody interested, you add firejail as the “command prefix” under Global Options or in the System Options of the game) which amongst other things blocks networking.

In fact I went and figure out how to do all that exactly because I wanted to run pirated games in Linux in a safe way and you can’t just rely on the lower probability of Windows games of having code that tries to determine if it’s being run with Wine and accesses Linux-specific functionality and files if it is.

PS: That firejail stuff also works for Linux native games (it just wraps whatever you’re running to start the game, be it Wine or directly the game Linux binary).

I run a few games posted by johncena141 on 1337x, so I consider it secure enough :p

I don’t consider anything with Windows safe. I do all of my non-gaming computing on my laptop with Linux.

I run such games on Linux now, mostly with wine/proton. There is some risk, sure, but I’d largely say that system is still secure. If something comes by and wipes out the system, I have snapshots of anything important, including root and home. If those are gone, I have versioned backups offsite and maybe offline. I don’t expect to receive any malware targeting my somewhat esoteric software choices from windows games, so I feel okay logging into a secure sevice, for example, but I may have to adjust this in the future.

With regards to smartphones, I think there are so many holes that it’s not much more secure, if any, than a paranoid desktop setup. From time to time I have installed random APKs and had extreme anxiety each time. I am massively more paranoid about my phone as I don’t have real control over what’s running on it. Hoping for more competitive open source solutions in the future.

Generally speaking, opening non-executable files is fine. There are and have been specific exploits which allow arbitrary code execution, but it’s dependent on the application/library loading them. The bigger danger is files disguised as other things. This is especially bad on Windows as it likes to hide that information from users, or just execute random embedded vbscripts, or whatever. Also see the recent whatsapp mimetype bug/exploit. Certain things pose more of a risk than others. PDFs (thanks adobe) can embed arbitrary javascript which is meant to be executed. Same as web pages, of course, but browsers have a lot more attention to sandboxing.

Edit: I don’t really run cracked software anymore, but I have VMs ready to go if need be. Would recommend others do the same.