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Game developers seemed to be swapping just as many floppies as everyone else. With the added advantage they often had stuff you weren't otherwise going to come
by oldcynic 8y ago
Game developers seemed to be swapping just as many floppies as everyone else. With the added advantage they often had stuff you weren't otherwise going to come across.
Later when I was buying everything the first thing I'd do was find the No CD hack online.
- kbenson 8y agoTo my understanding, that was one of the easiest ways to get a virus. Those Crack programs always triggered AV. I'm not entirely sure game companies didn't somehow get cracks included as viruses, but since you're already circumventing legal requirements to use the crack and getting it through back channels, it seems a very useful and likely infection channel for virus authors.
- stonogo 8y agoWhile some cracks definitely shipped malware, and more commonly someone would release a crack and then a distributor would add the malware, the reason those things triggered antivirus was because they were doing their jobs: writing to memory addresses within a separate process space. This is how the cracks worked, but it's also extremely common infection tactics from malware authors.
- Moru 8y agoThey were using pack programs that unpacked the crack program over itself to save space. This was what triggered the antivirus. The actual crack was often just there to rewrite the launcher code to skip the copy protection.
- codetrotter 8y agoYes, this is the correct answer.
- digi_owl 8y agoThat is the eternal problem of automated security stuff, the action may be legitimate or not based on context. And code is notoriously blind to context.
- oldcynic 8y agoI'm sure there were some, and I'm not saying never but as I was the one usually asked to help fix friends and family I'd like to think I'd catch local ones. Usually the AV trigger on cracks were one of the generic catches for writing to unusual places etc. There was one NoCD site that was highly reliable. Random Google searches were, as with everything, asking for trouble.
- Scoundreller 8y agogamecopyworld? Wow, it still looks the same way it did 15 years ago!
- StanislavPetrov 8y agoBack in the early days of cracked flippies virtually nobody had a hard drive to be infected.
- btbuilder 8y agoI fell victim to a virus on PC that only had a floppy drive. The virus was a DOS TSR virus that would stay resident, hook itself into DOS' interrupts and infect any executables run, even if on a different disk.