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In my perhaps anecdotal experience, the risk of getting a virus from a crack is and was hugely overblown. And we now know that copy protection came with malware
by BlueTemplar 4y ago
In my perhaps anecdotal experience, the risk of getting a virus from a crack is and was hugely overblown. And we now know that copy protection came with malware too, most infamously with Sony's SecuROM (same group also seems to have made Denuvo).
- max51 4y agoI got a few viruses myself. There were no free easy to use like we have today to sandbox an application or run a VM and it was well known that almost all cracks/keygen gave false positive. We just rolled the dice and hoped for the best. The viruses I have seen myself were really not that dangerous. Ransomware were not popular yet and our life not was tied to our computer as much. It was also easy to detect with task manager/services compared to today and it was possible to remove them yourself with your AV or manually. There were far less things running on your PC in the background and internet traffic was minimal.
- revelio 4y agoOnly if you define any driver as "malware". SecuROM didn't actually come with malware in the way normal people define it, it was just described that way by salty pirates.
- nullfield 4y agoEh. If it messed with the regular optical drive’s drivers, hooked privileged kernel functions, and generally (just like modern things like EAC) introduced holes the size a semi truck could drive through, it qualified as malware. No intent to pirate anything needed.
- revelio 4y agoThat's my point: that's not the definition used by anyone in the actual anti-malware space.