When you’re discussing your own OPSEC (Operational Security for those unaware), you have to evaluate and determine your personal threat profile. Generally speaking, you need to determine what risks you’re willing to accept, what risks you’re willing to mitigate, and what risks you will not tolerate. There’s a whole field of IT dedicated to this but the general idea is for you to understand that there is no perfect solution and everything is a trade off.

There is an inherent risk to downloading pirated software, especially software that you use for private activities (e.g. finances, etc.). With today’s landscape of mining crypto, I’d go so far as to say almost any pirated software is at risk of this.

I would agree that generally playing media files is relatively low risk (though there was a vulnerability I read about a few years back of a zip-type attack. The details allude me at the moment).

But for executables, you basically have two options:

• spin up a VM to host your executable, sandboxing it from everything else.
• trust the people who are providing the executable and run it on your computer

Personally, I avoid pirated executables. More often than not I can find a similar open source product that I can download. My risk tolerance is not only low, but I don’t see the benefits of using a particular company’s software especially if an open source is available.

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 dont run non free software. All games are in emulators or i buy them on steam or get them free on epic and play via heroic.

Any ebooks or pdfs are scanned on virus total and one positive result is enough to get deleted. I also only read them on an old tablet and old kindle both from around 2011/12 with networking disabled. They are only used for this purpose.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I don’t know if the malware that could be in these games work on Linux, but I take my time in picking torrents and pick ones through uploaders I know

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

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.

I mostly just avoid running pirated software. If I have to, I run the executable bits through stuff like virustotal first. And I keep my system updated.