this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
27 points (90.9% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

63502 readers
619 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):

🏴‍☠️ Other communities

FUCK ADOBE!

Torrenting/P2P:

Gaming:


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

How do you validate that what you torrented is clean/no malware/spyware? Specifically, I torrented two things:

  • Astute Graphics Plug-ins Elite Bundle 3.9.1.7z from teamos. *It is 678MB so I can't upload to Virustotal
  • Master Collection 2025 from uztracker (which is listed on monkrus's website's list of trackers). It is 37.5GB so I can't upload to Virustotal.

I'm not sure what I should to do to be honest.

Edit: Would splitting the 37.5GB file into 650MB pieces and then scanning with virustotal help? Not sure if downloaded files need to be whole for it to work properly.

This is the results from virustotal (I could only scan 4 files in the master collection without running the iso)

Thank you.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] USSEthernet@startrek.website 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

This is what I do. I have a VM for torrents and a VM sandbox to check stuff that I'm concerned about. At the host level I disable any type of sharing with the host, no copy paste, no sharing disks, nothing. The VM only gets the storage I assign to it and once I validate then I'll detach and mount it to the host.

[–] Yourname942@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Hey thank you for the info. Which VM do you use? How do you disable the various types of sharing with the host? Also, how do you validate? Sorry for all the questions, but that seems like it may be my only option

[–] USSEthernet@startrek.website 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

I use Hyper-V because I run server 2022 and it's free. Hyper-V allows you to disable any host resource sharing in the VM settings.

On my sandbox VM I'll scan the files then install and scan, then run the software and scan. I use both defender and I think malwarebytes. It's a lot of extra work for no gain, but I'd rather be too careful than risk installing malware.

[–] Yourname942@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you for the detailed response. Just to confirm, is Hyper-V your sandbox VM? I used ESET to scan the files I torrented, but they look very suspicious from virustotal, but I don't really know how to parse the info - knowing if it is a false positive/etc.

[–] USSEthernet@startrek.website 2 points 4 hours ago

Hyper-V is the hypervisor that the VM runs on. Yeah I don't really know which malware scanners are the go to ones anymore. Just figure if I can get it to pass through 2 different ones ok then it's probably ok. I'm sure there's some other good ones out there. I've heard of ESET and virustotal, but I'm not familiar.