(https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy) How do i check if a crack is safe or not?

@piracy How do i check if a crack is safe or not?

I'm trying to install a cracked version of davinci resolve on my pc, but I don't know if it's safe. is there a way to check easily?

linux #help

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Test strips. PSA: Everyone should test their drugs and carry narcan.
- I was gonna say "have someone else smoke it first"
- And don't use alone, pretty tricky to narcan yourself. Also gotta watch out lots of non-fentanyl tranqs getting mixed in with shit these days and narcan only works on opiods
Short answer: no, there’s not a way to check easily.
Long answer: don’t download form untrusted sources, if the crack is fully published on GitHub you can trust it more easily if the code is freely available and vetted by people who know what to look for.
If it's suss use a vm before your main OS.
- This is a good idea and a good practice in my opinion. Some malicious code detects when it’s being sandboxed and hides itself until it’s running somewhere it can do damage though.
  
  Once malware is VM aware it can also get outside a VM. Furthermore, malware can be written to seat itself comfortably in your PC and lay low for hours, days, weeks before becoming active. Installing in a VM and waiting for shit to hit the fan is not always reliable.
- And start with no network for the VM
If the installer is small enough (<650MB I believe), you can upload it to virustotal.com to have it be scanned by ~65 antivirus programs
Inhale and wait
- I always keep a bootable usb just incase…
Run it and close your eyes.
- I was gonna say 'cross your fingers and your toes'
  
  Clench your butt.
You can't. They're never safe. But you aren't downloading a crack to be safe, are you? Use a sandbox to examine what it does, trust that it's safe, or don't use it.
Statistically though, cracks are safer than the software they're for though. Hope that helps.
- If someone malicious can tamper with a crack, surely it is trivial to tamper with the NFO. So how do I know the MD5 sum is the original one?
  
  My take would be to check multiple sources and still be suspicious with the files even if they match.
@millions @piracy davinci resolve free I thought
- @helix2301 @millions @piracy it is both free and there paid version of it that has more features as if you scroll down to near the bottom of the page https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
Isn't DaVinci resolve free?
- They pay wall hardware encoding, and possibly other features, like high resolution formats.
- @ccdfa yeah but h264/mp4 exports are paid only from what I heard
  
  You've heard incorrectly, as I use the free version to make videos of my terrible gameplay and I usually export to MP4 using H264.
  
  On windows, the only features locked behind the paywall are required by professionals in film. This includes, but isn't limited to, larger than 4K timelines, 10 bit footage, advanced fusion filters and effects, niche export quality settings. As long as you're not working in the media industry, you won't need these.
  Try the free version first, before jumping into a crack. See if you even like it.
  
  export it as some QuickTime/mov/whatever and recode it with handbrake.
@millions @piracy I use shotcut for my video editing needs on linux not locked against any pay wall features https://www.shotcut.org/features/
first visual inspection: is there any rash or poop or anything nasty in there? then sniff.
Well, if your AV tells you there is a backdoor in it, don't open it, I would say. There can be valid reasons for cracks to be flagged, but you can usually check what it does by uploading it to a sandbox or checking the hash on virustotal.
run in a VM/container?
I never used Linux before, is virus still a problem for cracked software on Linux?
- It'll always be a problem for cracked software. But on Linux I find a good Free and open source alternative more readily than windows. I personally keep a good windows 10 VM around with snapshots for running software of dubious origins.
- Its mainly the market share thing really. Using good default policies on windows or Linux would kill a lot of malware but typical Linux users still just copy paste shit into the command line and add random repositories etc anyways. And a program running with my privileges in my home directory would be 99% as bad as it running as root since my machines are really just me using them.
  
  your main concern would be files. If you run something as your usual suspect user, that software can do pretty much whatever it feels like with files under those permissions, unless sandboxed.
  Not quite malware, but if someone wanted to troll you a goof rm -rf isn't hard.
Back when I used cracks often the cracks were small keygens and sometimes a patched main exe/dll, so I could just generate the key in a vm/sandboxed environment and inspect the patched binary, usually they did nothing weird. Huge repacks are often very sketchy though.. Nowadays there are many great FOSS alternatives so I tend to use them more.
Go to Virus Total and upload or scan the files with it.
A crack changes program code and is executed. There is no easy way to check if it is safe.
Unless you inspect the source code or binary code (directly or through reverse-engineering) you can not verify it.
What's left without that is attempts at gaining confidence through analysis trust of third parties - the providers, distributors, creators - who have to be confirmed beyond a matching text label too.
The alternative to or extension of being confidently safe or accepting the risk is to sandbox the execution. Run the crack in a restricted environment with limited access in case it does things you do not want to. Optionally monitoring what it does. Which has to be put into relation of what the program does without the crack.

39 comments