A majority of pirated video games tend to trigger false positives, which are warnings from antivirus programs that mistakenly flag certain files as malicious. These repacks are obviously no exception to this, as they have been shown to light up like crazy once uploaded to sites like VirusTotal. It's important to know that anything actually from me will never contain anything malicious.

Repacks of native PC games

This is pretty self-explanatory. Cracked .EXE's and .DLLs will always trigger anti-viruses. Most anti-virus software will have some sort of pesky real-time protection feature that will delete cracks, such as Microsoft Defender. This is the number one reason why most people tend to have their games not working after installing them.

Anti-viruses like Malwarebytes and Microsoft Defender will usually report these cracked files under generic names, with the most common one being "HackTool:Win32/Crack".

Ever so rarely, a repack of a native PC game will have a custom .EXE I made that was converted from a batch script. This is usually done due to needing certain parameters to make the game work, or if I wanted custom icon art. Which brings me to the next section...

Repacks of games with emulators

Any emulator repack I have is going to include the previously mentioned custom .EXE's. These .EXE's are simply for just having an icon on the desktop that launches a specific game, just like a normal PC game. They do nothing more, nothing less. However, because they are converted from batch scripts, they set off a majority of anti-virus and sandbox software like crazy despite doing literally nothing.

Here is a VirusTotal scan of custom .EXE shortcut taken from one of my repacks that anyone can download right now, which is MGS4. As you can see, a bunch of AV's are giving it a "generic" detection name while claiming it's doing things such as "Credential Access" and "Resource Hijacking". To a cautious person, this understandably doesn't look good at first, but once you look more into it, it's clear that it's a bunch of bullshit that anyone can replicate for themselves. Here's an example using BAT to EXE Converter, the same program I use for all of my custom .EXE shortcuts.

Here is a screenshot of the program. Right now, I have an .ico file attached to it, UPX compression enabled, and I set the console window to invisible. The actual command part of it is just nonsense, but that's important for what's coming up.

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For comparison, an actual line for my emulator shortcuts would be something like:

rpcs3.exe "games\BLJM61149\PS3_GAME\USRDIR\EBOOT.BIN"

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Here is our fresh new .EXE file that was converted from a .BAT file via this program. Running it does, well, nothing obviously. If we used the RPCS3 example line, it would also do nothing UNLESS both the emulator and game files were present in the current directory. Let's chuck it onto VirusTotal.

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Outstanding. Despite being converted from a .BAT file that has "deez nutz" as it's only line, it's making VirusTotal scream like crazy with all these detections. It's also a rootkit and a bootkit, apparently. The lesson here is that VirusTotal results for certain things are just bullshit. We can also rule out BAT to EXE Converter being a malicious program as well, since it's trusted freeware that has been out for years.

But someone said.../but there is this Reddit post saying...

They're wrong.

I get a lot of people claiming shit that literally didn't happen. I've gotten accusations of adware, miners, and every single nasty thing under the sun. I don't know where these people come from, but I am pretty sure I get far more of them compared to any other repacker.

My only possible guess is that they don't use an adblocker and accidently downloaded from a redirect, so they assume everyone else is just as fucking stupid as them. I don't bother engaging with any of these people because they all give the virtual equivalent of the fluoride stare when they're asked how before going back to mindlessly spewing bullshit.

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Pub: 02 Oct 2025 19:09 UTC

Edit: 02 Oct 2025 19:13 UTC

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