Do you risk installing a virus whenever you download one of these games, or is it generally safe?
- Thread starter a2shiftyy
- Start date
Relatively safe, I would virustotal.com any file (that is less than 750mb anyway) and have program that blocks internet access of files without your given permission.
- Nov 3, 2017
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Is there a list of which filehosts are the safe ones? Also sometimes when I scan them the result comes back and says the file is a trojan, or something of that sort I just wanna be safe.
- Jun 19, 2019
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Wh...I...yo.....you know what, anne O'nymous just confirm for me that one can make a virus in python, or for that matter in any coding language.
- Jun 10, 2017
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I confirm
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, like it's possible
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by example. The Python example is of course limited, because intended as educational, but the Perl one is more evolved, and totally feasible in Python.
The instant it's a coding language that handle disk access, it's possible to make
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, or
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, and even to make
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or
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if the language also have network capabilities. Both Ptyhon and Perl provide an interface to the OS and, at least for Perl, I'm not 100% sure for Python, with a bit of knowledge it's perfectly possible to do it without the need of an external package/module. What mean that both permit to deeply mess with a computer.The fact that they are script languages do not prevent them to be used that way. This especially since, unlike most script language, Python also works with pre-"compiled" scripts. This while there's at least one software that permit to have Perl scripts distributed as exe files, and so purely binary versions. Both mean that, by default, the user can perfectly not have access to the sources.
It's possible, and relatively easy to "uncompile" the pyo/pyc files, not to do the same with Perl pre-compiled code turned into exe. But in the same time, it's also possible to strongly complicate this task even for Python. un.rpyc, by example, use a magic method to embed the different python modules it need inside a rpyc file, and the same kind of method can be used to embed modules into a pyo/pyc file.
And, of course, once the source in front of you, you'll still need to understand them. While being mostly focused on readability, contrarily to Perl, Python style have enough obfuscation capabilities to make someone struggle to see that a malicious code hide in between something that seem innocent.
I talked only about Python and Perl, because it's the languages I know the most, and because initially the question is about Python. But, as I said above, it apply to every single coding languages. Even the different forms of BASIC permit to make viruses, this whatever if it's
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, or
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(yeah, TI stand for Texas Instrument, and the viruses are for a calculator).
- Aug 4, 2017
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You don't need the virus itself to be written in python though? Python can run an exe, so could write the virus in anything, distribute it with the game package and run it from python at game start-up?
I virus scan everything I download, including any games from here.
- Jun 10, 2017
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Totally, and I'll go further:
And your anti-virus would probably see nothing when you scan the game itself if the exe is embedded as Base64 text. The said Base64 text can even be XORed, just to be sure it looks like pure none sense for any anti-virus. Then few Python lines would be enough to decode the text, and save the exe on your drive.
It's then and then only, and obviously only if your anti-virus is configured to do a live scan, that it would be detected.
I don't really know to what extend it would be possible with Python, but the whole thing can also follow a rootkit approach. Therefore the exe would never be wrote on the disk, and directly in the RAM as a new process, or hooked to an existing process (the browser by example).
Modern anti-virus are expected to catch such behavior. But rootkit still exist, what prove that there's ways to escape their vigilance.
Of course, I don't say that it would be easy to do. But the fact is that, if Python have an interface for the right APIs, or permit to directly address whatever API, it's something that wouldn't be impossible.
- Jan 21, 2022
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All of the filehosts used in the first post of a thread are authorized by F95 staff to use after they are vetted. All uploaders for those files are also people who are trusted by the staff or are the developers, themselves.
I would bet that 99.9% of your "positives" are false positives.
- Jun 5, 2020
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I try to keep to mega files but 150+ games later across basically all of the offered hosts I'm 100% virus free. I consider it fairly safe here.
