Although piracy is not as rampant as it used to be, some students who do not have enough budget sometimes still take risks to play piracy. There is a recent incident to note. A foreign security company released a report a few days ago. They found that many well-known pirated games on the Internet contain malicious mining software that will secretly use your computer resources to mine in the background. Even if you have installed anti-virus software, it will use some methods to turn off or even delete your computer’s anti-virus.
Many pirated well-known games contain malicious mining programs
The foreign security company Avast published an article “Crackonosh: A New Malware Distributed in Cracked Software” a few days ago. They discovered that a new malware, Crackonosh, will be hidden in today’s well-known and popular pirated software. A total of 11 well-known pirated games have been found to contain Crackonsh:
- 《NBA 2K19》
- “Grand Theft Auto V”
- “Far Cry 5”
- “The Sims™ 4 Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter”
- “Euro Truck Simulator 2”
- “The Sims 4”
- “Jurassic World: Evolution”
- “Afterlife 4”
- “Call of Cthulhu: The Official Game”
- “World Football Contest 2018”
- 《We Happy Few》
Avast said it was aware of Crackonsh after receiving feedback from users on the Reddit forum that the Avast antivirus software disappeared from their computers for no apparent reason:
The following figure shows the entire installation process of Crackonsh. To put it simply, when the user installs the cracked software, the installation process of the XMRing mining program will be automatically executed. At the same time, in order to run the mining software normally, it will also induce the user to enter the safe mode of Windows. In this mode, the anti-virus software cannot be executed, which means that it can turn off or delete the anti-virus software and Windows Defender:
These are the antivirus software it queries: Adaware, Bitdefender, Escan, F-secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Norton, Panda.
The purpose of Crackonsh is only mining, so users will only notice the problem when their computer slows down.
Although at present, this malicious program does not seem to pose any threat to computer data, no one knows whether it will evolve into a more dangerous virus in the future. Therefore, it is still recommended not to use pirated games and software just for petty gains. The losses may be more serious than the money spent.
Source: KOCPC Chinese