[kbenson]

To my understanding, that was one of the easiest ways to get a virus. Those Crack programs always triggered AV. I'm not entirely sure game companies didn't somehow get cracks included as viruses, but since you're already circumventing legal requirements to use the crack and getting it through back channels, it seems a very useful and likely infection channel for virus authors.

[stonogo]

While some cracks definitely shipped malware, and more commonly someone would release a crack and then a distributor would add the malware, the reason those things triggered antivirus was because they were doing their jobs: writing to memory addresses within a separate process space. This is how the cracks worked, but it's also extremely common infection tactics from malware authors.

[Moru]

They were using pack programs that unpacked the crack program over itself to save space. This was what triggered the antivirus. The actual crack was often just there to rewrite the launcher code to skip the copy protection.

[digi_owl]

That is the eternal problem of automated security stuff, the action may be legitimate or not based on context. And code is notoriously blind to context.

[codetrotter]

Yes, this is the correct answer.

[oldcynic]

I'm sure there were some, and I'm not saying never but as I was the one usually asked to help fix friends and family I'd like to think I'd catch local ones. Usually the AV trigger on cracks were one of the generic catches for writing to unusual places etc.

There was one NoCD site that was highly reliable. Random Google searches were, as with everything, asking for trouble.

[Scoundreller]

gamecopyworld?

Wow, it still looks the same way it did 15 years ago!

[Semaphor]

Gcw. The site you went to to avoid damaging your discs. And improve performance. Well, and sometimes to play games you couldn't afford :D

[oldcynic]

Ah yeah, that was the one. :)

[StanislavPetrov]

Back in the early days of cracked flippies virtually nobody had a hard drive to be infected.

[btbuilder]

I fell victim to a virus on PC that only had a floppy drive.

The virus was a DOS TSR virus that would stay resident, hook itself into DOS' interrupts and infect any executables run, even if on a different disk.