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’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
On Windows: VirtualBox (free and easy to use, but still advanced/powerful) or HyperV (already included if you have Windows Pro).
On Linux: anything based on KVM, my personal favourite is virt-manager, but QEMU is also great.
I would stay away from VMware because the free version is quite limited, and the pro version is not free. The free alternatives are equally good or better, so no reason to use something paid imho.
Referring to it as “Oracles” brings a deep pain to me.