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If you wanted to be really cautious, you could diff the original and cracked binaries and reverse engineer the difference. We did that on a project for a client

If you wanted to be really cautious, you could diff the original and cracked binaries and reverse engineer the difference. We did that on a project for a client once (a major software corporation) and the cracked version of their software literally just had one opcode replaced. The fellow working on the project with me had a lot of specialized domain experience in such things, and told me the actual cracking teams would never put malware in their own cracks, because it would ruin their reputation in the scene. I'm sure some cracks have had malware added after release by other people, of course, but I wonder how much of it was fearmongering by software companies.

arsome 4y ago
I just did this the other day and fairly quickly confirmed the crack patch replaced only the RSA key, then they keygen'd the rest. The higher risk thing tends to be downloading cracks from torrents or usenet where there's 3rd parties between you and a scene group.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I compeletely trust the cracking teams themselves. They're not wasting their talents just to install a key logger into four random machines halfway across the world. The problem is, the scene usually isn't about making piracy mainstream. Many release groups only released their cracks within closed circles to show off that they managed to crack a game. The cracks that made it out to the web often came through leaks, hosted on a shady site or distributed through torrents. For an outsider, these cracked files weren't all that trustworthy. That, together with antivirus software being made completely unreliable because of false positives, made it very hard to trust the .exes/.dlls that I used. Piracy is still a major infection vector today, and I imagine it will always be because of all the fake cracks on SEO hacked websites and shady operations necessary for the original crackers to distribute a crack without copyright lawyers sending you very scary letters.

arsome 4y ago

I just did this the other day and fairly quickly confirmed the crack patch replaced only the RSA key, then they keygen'd the rest. The higher risk thing tends to be downloading cracks from torrents or usenet where there's 3rd parties between you and a scene group.

jeroenhd 3y ago

I compeletely trust the cracking teams themselves. They're not wasting their talents just to install a key logger into four random machines halfway across the world. The problem is, the scene usually isn't about making piracy mainstream. Many release groups only released their cracks within closed circles to show off that they managed to crack a game. The cracks that made it out to the web often came through leaks, hosted on a shady site or distributed through torrents. For an outsider, these cracked files weren't all that trustworthy. That, together with antivirus software being made completely unreliable because of false positives, made it very hard to trust the .exes/.dlls that I used. Piracy is still a major infection vector today, and I imagine it will always be because of all the fake cracks on SEO hacked websites and shady operations necessary for the original crackers to distribute a crack without copyright lawyers sending you very scary letters.