Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

https://xkcd.com/1200/ comes to mind.

Games have no sandboxing anyways. They can access most of the data on the systems on which they run. Whether the game, crack or a HV crack makes little difference.

Sure, running a hypervisor or kernel level does allow them a bit more access, mostly around persistence. But I don't think it is a huge difference to most people.

So IMHO you are already putting a lot of trust in any pirated software or crack, hypervisor bypasses are really just a small matter of degree. If you don't trust the crack don't run it. Easy as that. Or if you want robust protection run games on dedicated hardware with no personal information or in a dedicated untrusted gaming VM.

Generally I'd say they're one of the most dangerous things you could voluntarily run on your PC. As someone whose education and profession is in infosec, games are one of the things I refuse to pirate because the risk is just too high for me.

Just running an untrusted exe from a shady source is enough to make my hair stand on end but the idea of intentionally replacing low level hypervisor components makes me run away screaming.

FWIW, the type of games that require HV bypasses are ones that I would pass on because the "legitimate" DRM is basically equally as scary from a security perspective.

Everyone's risk tolerance is different though. 🤷‍♂️

I feel glad that they exist on a socioeconomic principle of fairness, as well as having the option to play those games becomes more "grounded". But from the perspectives of consumer rights and of digital sovereignty HV bypasses are absolutely terrible, and technically at least one level worse than DRM-ed games.

Honestly, all that effort could be better spent developing original indie IPs with ethically respectable distribution channels. But then again the same should be said of corporate DRM in games in general.

I've tried to understand what the hypervisor bypass is and I feel like I'm not fully grasping it, I just wanted to say that first so that if I sound stupid, it is because I am stupid. From my loose understanding, it sounds like you are trading giving a corpro entity more access than they should need to your hardware/system, to giving a modified and possibly sketchy program from an unknown source even more access. Sounds like a lose/lose situation and I am staying away from it, but I am glad someone (other than a complete lunatic) was able to break that DRM