Today I was trying to download Affinity Photo 2 from the websites listed on the megathread, as normally I do exactly that and everything goes just fine.
But when scanning the downloaded files. Windows Defender detected it as hacktool.win32.keygen and malwarebytes as Generic.Malware.AI.DDS.
In the case of Windows, I am guessing that it is not detecting a virus but the actual crack right? That’s what that means as far as I’m aware. But what surprised me was malwarebytes, it has sometimes warned about cracks but it’s not something it does often, and I don’t recognize the detection code, but it seems to be using AI to detect malware now?
Is this something that is known to happen? Malwarebytes AI seems to be detecting cracks as malware… Or is this actually a virus?
I put it in quarantine just in case, but I am guessing this has to be false positives, as it happened with 2 different downloads from 2 different websites.
VirusTotal results also flagged it as “malware”, but seems to be also detecting the crack. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/127540f7b3558a94f6e8a4ce9c695231e8715e20a17da4584d5df99035a79d49/detection
i trust anonymous internet people way more than i trust “ai”
Security Vendors (ie antivirus companies) don’t really care that an individual crack may or may not be dangerous on its own, but things like cracks often do display the kind of behavior viruses do, like modifying registries and verification files. While they make these things free for us to use, they’re technically doing things on the system the user isn’t supposed to do (because it impacts security/integrity).
Game cracks have been a long-used avenue for propagating viruses, so to serve their customers better, they probably err on the side of just assuming that they’re all potentially at risk. It’s a little over-the-top, but I can see the reasoning.
Finally, lot of antivirus companies are exactly that: companies. They exist to make a profit and they’re working with people who sell software by marking pirated copies of their software as malware, which in the view of the people who sell software: they are malware. So often the way they make money dictates what they treat as legitimate versus not legitimate. Especially in the US, where the government does a lot of work to support private companies in enforcing copyright.
In other words, it’s a crap shoot. I’d say if the virus signature only mentions it being a game crack it’s possibly safe, because if it actually contains a virus payload, I would think it would identify that one, too. It wouldn’t take a more serious virus and dump it under the “game crack” without more explanation, or at least I hope they don’t approach it that way.
If I were in your position, I wouldn’t have installed it. VT got 37 vendors to flag it.
And it’s very common for cracked programs to contain some malware, so my trust wasn’t high to begin with. I’m always skeptical about this kind of thing.
This is why I always disable Windows Defender and everything Windows does to protect my machine. Because it will throw a fit the moment I even downloaded a pirated game and knows something is up with it. It won’t let me run EXEs and purge the file.
I’m not saying it is or is not a false positive, so please read the rest of my comment with that in mind.
But, that said, this is not new: AV has triggered on cracks and cheat software and similar stuff since forever.
The very simplified explanation is that the same things you do to install a rootkit, you do to cheat in a game with or crack software DRM.
Bigger but, though: cracks and game cheats have also been a major source of malicious software for just as long, so like, it’s also entirely likely that it’s a good catch, too.
I’m aware of that, I don’t feel like installing it honestly. I might look for other downloads later. I suspect it’s just the crack because it detected the same from two different downloads on reputable websites on this community.
Honestly I think i should start using vm’s to run pirated software, not games, I have never haved problems with those since I’m already pretty experienced when it comes to that, but software has always felt more awkward to install. A VM could help with these situations where I’m not really sure if it’s just the crack or actually malware.
Yeah, I don’t let anything that has to be cracked out of an isolated VM until it’s VERY clear that nothing untoward is going on.
QEMU has proven perfectly lovely for a base to use for testing questionable software, and I’ve got quite a lot of VMs sitting around for various things that ah, have been acquired.
Had never heard of QEMU, would you recommend it over the typical ones like Oracle’s? I have also heard of VMWare but honestly I have never used it. I really don’t know which one to try
