Honestly, the safest move is to keep these files totally separate from your personal stuff. Running them in a VM or dedicated hardware is really the only way to avoid getting hacked.
Lick it.
You again? GET OUT OF MY CAR!
Run it inside a VM? If you're suspicious or just worried, this would resolve most if not all of possible worries you may have.
This is what I do. I have a VM for torrents and a VM sandbox to check stuff that I'm concerned about. At the host level I disable any type of sharing with the host, no copy paste, no sharing disks, nothing. The VM only gets the storage I assign to it and once I validate then I'll detach and mount it to the host.
Hey thank you for the info. Which VM do you use? How do you disable the various types of sharing with the host? Also, how do you validate? Sorry for all the questions, but that seems like it may be my only option
I use Hyper-V because I run server 2022 and it's free. Hyper-V allows you to disable any host resource sharing in the VM settings.
On my sandbox VM I'll scan the files then install and scan, then run the software and scan. I use both defender and I think malwarebytes. It's a lot of extra work for no gain, but I'd rather be too careful than risk installing malware.
Thank you for the detailed response. Just to confirm, is Hyper-V your sandbox VM? I used ESET to scan the files I torrented, but they look very suspicious from virustotal, but I don't really know how to parse the info - knowing if it is a false positive/etc.
Hyper-V is the hypervisor that the VM runs on. Yeah I don't really know which malware scanners are the go to ones anymore. Just figure if I can get it to pass through 2 different ones ok then it's probably ok. I'm sure there's some other good ones out there. I've heard of ESET and virustotal, but I'm not familiar.
How would I know if there was hidden spyware/malware if I ran it in a VM? (if they are smart they try to be undetected)
You don't, but if someone figured out how to do a VM escape surely they would have bigger aspirations than some random torrent
I mean yeah that makes sense, but I don't know enough about torrenting (nor tech in general) to know if something is safe/trustworthy sadly.. I feel like I'm probably better off spending several hundreds on a subscription, than more likely than not be hacked/get advanced spyware. I doubt they wouldn't prey on dumb people like me if it is easy. If I was more knowledgeable it would probably be possible to manually remove infected bits of a torrented file to make it work, but idk.
If you find torrenting and running a VM too technical, I'm sorry to say you're better off not trying to identify and remove any malicious code.
Don't put yourself down and waste your money, you can get over the learning curve for this, it's not that steep.
To elaborate, as the previous reply stated, running the cracked programs inside a virtual machine allows you to isolate an environment specifically for this usage. Configured properly (another reply went into more detail here), even if the cracked software has something malicious, it can't harm you. So you can safely ignore wether there's a virus or not.
Thank you for the info, and for the encouragement. Yeah I am definitely going to try using a VM to diagnose the files more closely. To confirm, is a VM, (such as Hyper-V) similar to Windows Sandbox, where it effectively resets itself (new slate) each time you open it? Or can I install the torrented files in the VM and still access it if I close and reopen the VM in the future?
Also, which VM would you suggest? I apologize for appending so many questions to my original post.
AFAIK, you don't. You might be able to validate the actual software package's hash against official sources, but the crack won't validate because it's different from the unedited files.
That's why picking a site and uploader you know is important. You're kind of just hoping for the best.
I mean, is it safe to assume that the torrent from megathread > monkrus > uztracker is safe? I've read that you either go genp or monkrus for less chance of malware.
Alternatively, do you think splitting the 37.5GB file into 650MB pieces and then scanning with virustotal would do much good?
M0nkrus is probably safe, that's why people recommend them so frequently.
I lack the technical knowledge to say whether splitting the file to scan would work or not, but I suspect not.
Validate the checksum against the official sources.
Wouldn't it be different since non-official versions are cracked? I'm also not really sure how I would even do so for that plugin since it is a subscription, nor how to do so for the master collection, because it technically does not exist officially.
Just run the file against clamav, and you should be able to tell whether or not it's got issues. That's generally what's done in commercial spaces.
Thank you for the advice. Is clamav just another antivirus software?
Yes, it's open source antivirus software.
The entire internet practically runs on what these guys do.
It has a tool that you can use to scan whatever binary you want and it'll tell you whether or not it's a virus which fits what you need to do
Oh okay, thanks. I don't know how it compares with Eset for example. My antivirus said the files were clean, but the virustotal results are really sketchy.
It's not like traditional antivirus software, it just includes a tool that you can use to manually scan files to see if it has a virus signature, which is all Eset and most virus scanners are doing on the backend. They're also doing what's called heuristics, which is where they're using predictive modeling to try and identify if a program has what they call an attack signature. This does result in false positives, just so you're aware.
All virus total is doing is running a bunch of virus engines like eset and clamav on the back end to see if it triggers anything.
If both your virus software and clamav comes back clean, then I'd trust it.
Would you trust it if the detection is 0, but there are network connections? (contacted domains and contacted IP addresses)
A lot of the time these apps will have heuristics that will reach back out and so you will see network connections occasionally.
Without knowing more about this application, I don't have the right context to evaluate whether or not I would trust something like that, so it's gonna be up to your comfort level. But, if clamav came back clean and so did your other virus software, I would assume it's not malicious traffic.
What about installing some antivirus than can scan on demand?
I don't know how's the "market" right now, but a few years ago Malwarebytes was good for Windows, and ClamAV in Linux
I ran my antivirus on the plugins.zip folder and it didn't detect anything. Then I ran it on the master collection folder, and it also didn't detect anything, but it suspiciously finished almost immediately although it does only contain the iso (37.5GB), .info file (2.46KB), .sha (85B), .md5 (77B), so I'm not sure. Also, I just posted the virustotal results in this thread.
You may have to mount the iso first before a virus scanner would scan it. Which I would advise against doing on a machine you care about. And even then, it might not scan the suspect files anyway, a lot of scanners will only check files with certain extensions.
Otherwise you could just run it in a virtual machine with no network connections and see if anything sus happens. But it might not happen right away, or it might detect the VM and not trigger any malware.
These are ways you can gather information to make an informed decision, but ultimately you may just have to decide whether you trust the source enough to roll the dice. Only you can make that decision.
If I use the VM with no network connections, is there any way for me to manually find malware hidden in the files? I'm not really sure what to look for specifically. I definitely want to try using a VM to more closely inspect the files
This is way outside of my expertise. I'm not sure you'd find anything VirusTotal's behaviour checks didn't find, anyway. Usually, if I'm at all unsure, I just won't run it.
That's what https://virustotal.com/ is for.
This was the result: https://imgur.com/a/5rEpIga I'm not sure if that means that it is safe/unsafe, but it seems extremely suspicious.
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