90% of Game Hacks are Infected with Malware

AVG Insight Issue 2 - April 2013:

http://mediacenter.avg.com/content/...g-insight/avg-insight-issue-2-april-2013.html

 

B..but..but, what about FPs? D=

 

I always have doubt on any story that reports 90%, especially one by an anti-malware company. Not to mention, there is a post in General about AVG hitting on this very forum.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2218250&postcount=1

 

I don't think 90% is realistic at all.

There are many false positives when it comes to keygens and cracks, from various AV vendors.

 

I personally believe 90% of statistical findings are useless (well, not including mine )

 

That is at least 90% accurate what you wrote there.
Follow the money trail.
Mrk

 

I'm very skeptical of the security industry as a whole, and agree that these "90%" articles are a little out there. There's too much money to be had in keeping alive malware fighting techniques that are obsolete and/or hard to actually improve.

 

I think that "official" games contain more malware than the hacks.......the drm on some is over the top....

 

That's pretty much the truth for all things "anti-pirate". Just wait until everyone brings their new Xbox home that's coming.

 

I go the other way. I believe that "90% are infected" is a conservative/too low figure for game hacks. lol

Some fools people deliberately get infected by these things because they trust the hack devs and their claims of "false positives", lol.

 

90%? From my personal experience it is about 1%, 5% is you are extremely pessimistic and include fake cracks and game serials packed in sfx exe files.
On the other hand, AV reports about 90% of "legitimate" and working nocd cracks as malware, like popular paul.dll, so I would not bet my money on this news.

 

90% is probably quite accurate, money trail or no. Just look at some Windows image files from Pirate Bay or wherever some time, you'll see
- Dodgy keygens and whatnot that are packed and encrypted
- Dodgy preinstalled software
- System files modified with binary patches from gods know where

Examples:

- One of the more popular Windows XP activation cracks
a) Is packed in some weird format. ("It's to make the file smaller LOL" -> yeah right, it's only a few hundred KB.)
b) Applies a binary patch to winlogon.exe. Think about this. How do you know the modified EXE isn't logging your keystrokes?

- One of the stripped down releases of Windows XP, from a pirate who is widely considered "trustworthy," includes a browser called Browzar. Browzar is built on a fake reputation and may be malware.

Same old problems apply to game piracy. You're running some completely untrusted binary on your system, created by someone who for whatever reason is willing to stomp all over copyright law - possibly out of some kind of strange false altruism, possibly out of being a greedy blackhat who wants to steal from you. You don't know.

And sure, you can't trust your antivirus, because the AV companies want to please the copyright holders and will flag cracks as malware. So what? That just means you have even less to go on.

tl;dr If you want the game, buy it. If you don't want to buy it, find something else to do with yourself.

 

This OTOH I kind of agree on. One of the big reasons I don't buy current games is the DRM. I am not going to let some company root my system just so I can play stupid games.

 

They are selling BS like Microsoft did about keygens few days ago.
For someone in this business, you'd expect them to make more professional statements. And no, 90% of "hacks" are not infected. Maybe 90% of them are pretending (similar name, game icon) to be hacks for games but are in fact stand-alone malware. There is a huge difference. Not to mention this isn't true for verified releases done by well known scene groups.
It also heavily depend on the game type. Blizzard games are more interesting because of the online accounts (World of Warcraft and StarCraft for example) that you can steal and sell further. Others aren't as interesting...

And whats the most fun part here, AVG is posting this statement. A vendor who's notorious for false positives on whole lot of stuff which they never fix (especially such grey area stuff thats often packed with cryptors or packers but aren't malicious at all). Thanks fro that AVG...

Oh and last thing, there is a HUGE difference between hacks and crack.
Hacks are trainers and other injectors that interfere with the game parameters (unlimited cash, unlimited ammo, unlimited nitro or unlimited whatever).

Cracks are considered as No-CD patches (though these are grey area really) and patches that bypass game activation systems or copy protections.

The main difference here is that hacks are not considered illegal for as long as they are not used in multiplayer sessions, where cracks are illegal in most cases (No-CD are, like i said grey area because many use them for legally purchased games so they don't have to use CD/DVD when they play them).

So, AVG, if you do a report like this, at least do it properly...

 

While the gamestudio's force their DRM through our throats,some of their employees used the lazy way to solve gameplay problems and Steam compatability issues:

http://www.geek.com/games/ubisoft-red-faced-after-no-cd-crack-found-in-vegas-2-patch-576683/
http://kotaku.com/5537223/is-that-a-cracked-version-of-max-payne-2-on-steam

So,it seems that they don't mind about infected cracks....