I've always bought my games on steam or OFFICIAL key resellers (GMG) since I was an adult, but sometimes it has got really expensive.
Do you consider 'cracked games' safe for your PC, your data, and finally your privacy?
You should always support developers, but it's not always possible.
Search for this keyword : "Fmhy". It the acronym of free media heck yeah and It's a curated list of safe sites. Fitgirl repack are the safest you can get.
The users themselves. Everyone that use cracked software know the binaries could potentially contain malware, so the people that share these cracked software need to build trust from the community before being called "safe" and get recommended. If ten if not hundred of thousands people use the binaries from a specific "site" or "repacker" without ever getting a virus, then it's most certainly safe to use/download. Fitgirl is the safest and most known repacker ever (as long as you download from the official site and not some shady copycat, that is)
Run them in a sandboxed VM?
VM escaping is not impossible, but its probably outside of the ability of most cracked games with malware.
Even better; Go with a bare metal linux install, and then use a sandboxed VM.
Even less malware is going to be able to VM escape and then also have any idea of what to do in a linux environment, purely because the vast, vast majority of
exploits(I should say malware, not exploits per se) are designed to fuck up Windows.Is this perfectly safe?
No, but nothing is.
Any legitimately purchased game with closed source, kernel level anti cheat could be doing literally anything to your PC, and you wouldn't know.
Plundering in the early-mid 00' was dicey but in the last ten years I think the only problem I've had was getting a tarbomb once and even that could have an honest mistake on the part of noob coder. I am a little wary of games that have online hacks and normally block all online features. Honestly you have to be more careful with torrent client than anything. Most of them try to back door a ton of garbage when you first install them. And yeah always use a vpn or you'll get angry messages from your isp.
Nothing is ever really safe. If a developer or publisher gets compromised, an attacker could put malware in an official release and push it through Steam. https://outshift.cisco.com/blog/top-10-supply-chain-attacks
You should always use protective measures like antivirus and dropping unnecessary privileges, and use extra measures when running anything from a less trusted source.
I run them under a different user, but the same for non-pirated games.
