I would usually stick to the popular scenes only: don't know if they had ever put viruses in. But for whoever experienced, what effects did the virus have?
previously known as Discrete_BOB_058
Whenever my virus killer says something is infected, I always double check it with the brilliant VirusTotal (https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload), the online virus checker that polls more than sixty virus checker engines ,including Kaspersky, BitDefender, Avast, Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware Sophos, ClamAV, McAfee, Symantec, etc. The list also includes 'Microsoft', which I assume means their AV checker Defender.
leileilol wrote on 2024-04-03, 00:30:It's more out of paranoia of compressed binaries than anything. The scene tends to have a habit of shrinking things (SMALLER iS BETTER) and viruses love the same benefits of code obfuscation mutually.
Oh, I hadn't thought of that, but it does make sense.
chinny22 wrote on 2024-04-04, 04:28:leileilol wrote on 2024-04-03, 00:30:The scene tends to have a habit of shrinking things (SMALLER iS BETTER)
I wish all software developers still thought like this like they once did. Even though total HDD space went backwards when SSD's became mainstream programs still like to eat up more and more disk space.
Yes, and it's really annoying. But gamers want ever better graphics, so more and more data needs to be stored.
eddman wrote on 2024-04-04, 10:51:Shagittarius wrote on 2024-04-04, 07:36:Personal experience first hand but you know, FAFO. This was not even detected at the time by Anti-virus.
Do you remember for which game it was? Was it made by a known group or generic/unnamed?
Was it really a virus or one of those false positives?
This was somewhere around 2000, I was using Win98. I believe all of the cracks were from a certain well known site which I will not repeat here, but is still around today. I had just gotten a larger HDD and decided I was going to put as many of my games as I could on my HDD with no-CDs so it would be super easy to play them. That system was compromised and I realized it by the next day. The virus detector never warned me about anything, and this was the last time I ever trusted a no-CD crack. I couldn't tell you which game it was as I installed a bunch of cracks at the same time and it wasn't until the next day I realized it was infected. This was the one and only time I've ever gotten a virus.
Must've been a rare case. I've used hundreds by known names and it's been fine.
If I had to guess maybe a fake file was posted on the site, either by accident or by a rogue staff.
Same. I've been using cracks on my games for 34+ years.
Block all ads.
Only grab files from approved sources.
Use a secure os and security software.
Manually scan all downloads.
Occasionally I'll debate setting up a separate machine in a secure vlan just for that purpose but has never been necessary.
Recently confugured my firewall so I have to allow list everything I want to access.
Its nice to hear you guys conveying a positive experience, I'm just too traumatized to trust them anymore =)
DosFreak wrote on 2024-04-04, 16:43:Only grab files from approved sources.
I wish I knew of a good source for such things.
I hope nobody actually replies with a link to one, I don't want to get anyone in trouble! 😁
Recently confugured my firewall so I have to allow list everything I want to access.
What happens when you do a web search, you have to add every result you want to look at to an approved list!?
My paranoia has sometimes extended to disassembling to see what seems to have been changed by the patch. I came to post because I just ran across a tool that would apparently make that easier: https://zynamics.com/bindiff.html I haven't looked at it very closely yet, but I found it from Tavis Ormandy's twitter, so I guess it's probably reputable.
As far as approved sources I mean by those sites that the community uses and not sketchy sites with popups and such that make you think you are downloading what you want but it's actually a PUP or worse.
So I use noscript on my desktop browsers and phones and for those websites I "trust" (only what is actually needed to load the site) in noscript I've exported that to my FW to allow those sites.
As far as searching then as far as noscript and the FW is concerned it's just google.com or whatever search site but yes if you click on a link to a site that's not allowed then it'll be blocked....as it should be.
