This is why I only run software in 100% offline boxes.
I wish I could find good old cracking communities, but paranoia keeps me from going into the otherwise descent communities, since as you said most of these places are criminal and risky with not only malware but other trash.
True scene releases don't have viruses, but let's explain this a bit better.
The warez scene isn't about people wanting free shit and sharing it with other. The warez scene is about people challenging themselves to circumvent anti-piracy measures because they see it as a challenge, to then show it off to others. It stems from the old-school hacker culture way back in the 1970's and 1980's and it was always a form of digital sport where groups competed with each other who will crack something first. The free games were a side effect.
Once a scene release was uploaded to Usenet or the scene group's FTP server, only then would it be pulled by someone and reuploaded on more accessible sites, usually The Pirate Bay or other popular BitTorrent tracker. The issue is that some will reupload the scene release 1:1, and some will abuse this system to inject malware into it. That's how it has always been and only a select few have access to the source. It's been a game of risk that I think everyone who isn't braindead consciously accepted and knew how to check if what they got is genuine or not.
The issue is that the warez scene is dying. Most scene groups have ceased operation, and the reason they were operating was to compete with each other because that was their motivation to exist and crack shit. I wouldn't be surprised if their tightly knit subculture being bastardized by freeloaders treating their work just as a way to get free shit wasn't a factor in that too. You could learn a lot about those groups through the .NFO files which they always used as a form of communication with releases.
With most scene groups being dead, Denuvo being a massive pain in the ass to crack, zero motivation to do it for sport, and the new subverted culture of "cracking games for the sake of free shit", that gave the rise to the P2P scene, which is vastly different from the warez scene. Warez scene was very secluded and secretive and cracked games for fun, while the P2P scene is very open and cracks games for the sake of free games.
Two names from the P2P scene you might know are Voksi and EMPRESS. Both were very active on Reddit, which is a major distinction because no real scene member would use mainstream social media like that, with Voksi inevitably getting caught because he was too open about what he was doing. EMPRESS, the mentally deranged catfishing psycho, not only cracked games for the sake of free games, but for the sake of profit. He was the first AFAIK to actually ask for cash before he cracked any game with Denuvo, which just goes to show the major culture shift in this sphere of interests. I think by now he fucked off because he went completely off his fucking rocker, and right now there is no one to crack Denuvo, so the scene is more or less dead. You still have repackers like FitGirl who find the thrill in figuring out how to compress the living shit out of releases to make the download as small as possible while retaining bit perfection with the full release and it's their main motivation, but they can't exist without someone cracking the DRM and making releases.
Now I don't think I ever got a virus while installing cracked shit, but that's because I know how this works and what to look for and where to avoid it. The issue is when you have people who have zero idea about how the warez scene works, like OP over here, and they go to sites that claim to be this group, offering torrents of various games. Or people who aren't up to speed on general P2P affairs and still believe that The Pirate Bay is the place to go for torrents, or uTorrent is the client to use, because that's what was the bomb back in the 2000's but by 2010's it became a cesspool everyone avoided.
tl;dr: software piracy isn't for everyone, it's easy to step on a mine if you're not experienced but with experience you can avoid them, and scene groups don't have their own websites.
Unironically the current best curated source of information on piracy is the
r/Piracy megathread (
mirror 1/
mirror 2) if you want to get up to speed on the topic. It sure helped me a ton.
There's also
r/CrackWatch to get some news on scene releases and such. And yes, the subreddit is the OG spot, any website calling itself CrackWatch is the same type of deceiving bullshit as "SKIDROW/RELOADED official website". Media piracy is one of the few things that Reddit is still good for for some reason.
