What’s best practice to safely play pirated games on Linux? Looking to mitigate potentially malicious executables from wrecking havoc on my system.
It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you’re familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that’s why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they’re distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody’s going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say “Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!” on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you’ll find that in almost all cases, it’s actually just a generic, non-specific detection of “tools associated with piracy or hacking” or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it’s literally detecting the fact that it’s a keygen, and saying “that’s scary! you won’t want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don’t worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!”
It’s not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It’s classic FUD tactics and they’re all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.
Downloaded a game which Windows Defender flagged as high-threat for containing “Cracked game content” the other day. Why yes, my cracked copy of this game IS cracked, thank you for noticing.
Somebody should create a piracy bible, and make this message part of it
Unless you inspect every line of code and/or monitor your computer activity to a super human level then you’ll never know.
Viruses don’t behave like a neanderthal like they used to 20 years ago, so just because you don’t notice a virus doesn’t mean you don’t have one. Let’s be honest, viruses are still a thing and botnets have become a thing. These don’t magically appear from nothing.
You shouldn’t be blindly trusting anyone on the internet, especially those not abiding by the laws. People and entities can be impersonated. They can behave differently at any moment.
Personally i would do one of three things, run pirated content, in a VM, on a separate drive, or on a dedicated computer - because why take the risk when you don’t have to.
I trust the pirates more than the corporations.
Remember the Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal?
Maybe times have changed but when I was in the warez scene 25+ years ago and essentially pirated every game I played, I saved all those games and the keygen.exe files and when they get scanned by modern AV they all come back infected. If anything it’s different because viruses are pointless now with the internet and there are much broader malware injection points nowadays than the minimal game pirating scene. But yeah I don’t know what I’m talking about, just my historical POV.
To be fair, nowadays malware behavior is more likely to come from the companies than the cracks.
Safest possible way? Separate machine on a different network, like guest Wi-Fi.
Realistically? I use containers blocking Internet and most file access and only use sources I trust not Internet rando releases.
Right, to elaborate run a packet capture and monitor the IPs your system connects to when installing and playing the game.
Never use a web browser with email or any other access to online accounts, clear all cookies after each browsing session.
I’d argue have a separate boot drive with absolutely nothing stored, nothing critical, no cookies, it’s single use of getting the games and hell, probably even run a VPN while playing the games so no tracing back to ISP public IP.
