I understand that sharing video, photos, documents etc. is relatively safe because the data is not executed in the processor as instructions. How come people are willing to download and install pirated software though? How can one be confident that it does not contain malicious addons? Are people just don’t know the risks? Or are there protection mechanisms that I am missing? I mean since the software is usually cracked there is not much use in comparing checksums with the originals, is it?
Long story short.
Basically the same stuff you should be doing with all software.
Edit for firewall clarification.
What software do you recommending for scanning? Microsoft defender?
I don’t really use Windows except for playing games, so someone else may have a better answer.
For me, I want 3 types of protection, priority order.
Rootkit and ransomware protection. Lock down and protect system files.
Firewall. Stop software from calling home (and possibly invalidating my forged license) and to stop malware from reaching out to command and control systems.
Malware scanning and suspect execution detection. Most antivirus software detections will be in only one of a couple categories: keygen, generic trojan, or obfuscated executable. If I encounter this, I go to VirusTotal.com and drop the offending file(s) for it to scan. If I’m still concerned I will use an online sandbox execution recorder that tells you what the exe does such as outbound comms, file modifications, registry read/writes, etc.
Windows Defender accomplishes these requirements. Although it is a bit clunky and other mainstream antivirus (paid or free) accomplish the same in a much cleaner interface.
I cannot stress enough the importance of downloading pirated software from a trusted source.
We are seeing on our corporate network lots of browser hikackers that connect to c&c and are used in botnet DDOS as a service. Once you install x software it sets up a persistent service that keeps modding chrome.exe etc
Firewalling the .exe that you installed does nothing to stop the calls to c&c
Fair point. Malware can tunnel through existing comms, thus firewalling the exe would do little to protect you.
That’s why I recommended a multilayered defense and practicing good opsec.
An exe that installs a service, modifies unrelated executables, and sends comms through an unrelated application would be a catastrophic failure in any good defense.
If your system is this wide open then you’ll be likely to have all sorts of problems from non pirated software. Such as freeware that installs adware.
I have tried to find these in the wild to no avail.
Unfortunately the machines that get infected are not fully controlled by us but they get networking and internet from us (space rental in the building), so we isolate them as much as possible and we black hole all the bad traffic on the router level.
Our machines all have EDR and strict security policies. Not much gets past that.
Right on. Gotcha.