Not to start a war, but I think the place here is better for free discussion of games piracy. the lemmy community they site on their subreddit is literally dead, has just one or two posts. It would have been good if a rival community to r/piratedgames appears here on dbzer0 too, I mean r/piracy is still there, but this place is better, right ?
I’ve been pirating games for 20 years and only ever got a virus when I was very young and didn’t know any better. Downloading from reputable scene groups, repackers, and private trackers doesn’t really put you at risk. There’s also plenty of multiplayer games that work on pirated copies, either with other pirates, or sometimes even with legit players. Denuvo has slowed down the rate of cracks, but things aren’t really much different now than they’ve ever been.
How does one get access to a good private tracker these days? Any recommendations?
Start with Myanonamouse since its only semi-private with how often they have sign ups, then get an invite on their forums for something else. You kind of have to work your way up unless you have a friend with invites already and should be willing to upload if you want to get into good trackers.
there really is no way to know if you’ve got a virus. it doesn’t take a lot of time to develop a malware that is undetectable, especially if you target something very specific and make it be patient about it. e.g. wait a month, snatch all the browser cookies and send them to a server hosted on azure.
or every so often snatch the clipboard
there are a lot of ways to be very silent
I highly suggest you don’t use the pc you run the pirated games on for anything critical
background: I crack stuff as a hobby (never published anything), used to be a security engineer, programmer by hobby