Cracks and cybercrime: a guide for judges and forensic experts
1. The criminal-law relevance of 'cracks': why the start of the chain matters. This note was prepared by Dr. Christian A. Biniat for his presentation at the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), within the global discussions on software piracy and cybercrime. With more than two decades of work protecting intangible assets, pursuing piracy and designing cybersecurity strategies alongside public bodies and major technology companies, Dr. Biniat proposes here an integrated approach addressed to judges and forensic experts: to understand pirated software and 'cracks' not as a marginal phenomenon, but as the first link of attack chains that affect the stability of judicial systems, economic security and, ultimately, the daily life of millions of people.
Global studies by organizations such as The Software Alliance (BSA), together with analyst firms like IDC, estimate that a very significant share of the software installed on personal computers worldwide is unlicensed and that organizations face a roughly one-in-three probability of encountering malware when they obtain or install unlicensed software. The same reports estimate that handling incidents associated with unlicensed software entails aggregate costs of hundreds of billions of dollars per year for the private sector.
Specific research has been built on this quantitative basis regarding the link between piracy and malicious code. Studies commissioned by Microsoft in the Asia-Pacific region have shown that a relevant fraction of the sites hosting download links for pirated software systematically expose users to security risks, including downloads with embedded malicious programs. More recent academic work focused on Southeast Asia analyzed hundreds of pirated copies obtained both on physical media and through online downloads and found infection rates of around 30–35% for certain malware families, especially adware and trojans.
Cybersecurity industry analyses describe specific campaigns in which the main 'hook' for victims is the offer of cracks or free installers. Investigations by various firms, including Trend Micro, explain how criminal groups use platforms such as YouTube and search engines to distribute content that appears to offer cracked software. The links lead to hosting services where manipulated installers, instead of providing a free license, download and run encrypted payloads designed to steal browser data and financial credentials, or to set the stage for subsequent ransomware attacks.
Shift in the judicial perspective. From a judge's perspective, these findings force a change of focus. The actor who develops and distributes a crack is not a marginal player operating 'on the periphery' of copyright law, but often the first operational link of a transnational criminal enterprise. The main purpose is no longer to avoid paying for a license, but to obtain a position of control over thousands of devices in different jurisdictions to extract credentials, financial data, medical records, corporate or government information, and from there to run fraud, extortion or sabotage campaigns.
Moreover, the internet distribution model makes the place of the offense intrinsically transnational: the server hosting the crack may sit in one country, the command-and-control infrastructure in another, the operators in a third, and victims spread across dozens of jurisdictions. In this context, focusing only on the 'last link' (the ransomware that encrypted a hospital, the consummated bank fraud) and ignoring the production and circulation of the cracks that enable these attacks effectively means leaving one of the most important elements of the criminal chain without prosecution.
The leading international instruments to combat cybercrime have taken note of this reality. The Budapest Convention on Cybercrime aimed from the outset to harmonize national legislation on computer-related offenses, facilitate investigations and strengthen international cooperation, including the obligation for each State Party to designate 24/7 contact points to provide immediate assistance in investigations involving computer systems and electronic evidence. More recently, the discussion and adoption of a global cybercrime convention within the United Nations has rounded out this picture with a treaty seeking to close normative and procedural gaps and reinforce cooperation to investigate offenses such as ransomware and online fraud, which generate losses of systemic magnitude.
2. Technical introduction for forensic experts: how to detect malware in pirated copies. The second axis of the document is aimed especially at forensic IT experts. The goal is not to replace specialized technical manuals, but to offer a synthetic, accurate framework to guide malware detection when the object of analysis is a pirated copy or a crack.
2.1. Common infection patterns. Empirical studies show that, in the context of pirated software, certain categories of malicious code predominate. Academic analyses describe a strong presence of adware and trojans, with infection rates around 34–35% in the samples analyzed. Industry experience converges in that cracks and fake installers usually embed remote access trojans (RATs), infostealers (designed to extract credentials, cookies, crypto wallets and other sensitive information), and loaders or droppers that fetch new payloads — including ransomware — from attacker-controlled servers.
2.2. Integrity verification against the legitimate version. A first plane of analysis, especially useful in forensic settings, is to compare the suspicious sample against a verifiable legitimate copy of the same software. Standard practice in secure software management is for vendors to publish cryptographic hashes (e.g. SHA-256) of installers and to digitally sign them. Standardized steps for the expert: compute and record hashes of the suspicious installer; verify the digital signature and code-signing certificate; obtain a legitimate copy from the vendor; compute hashes and signature properties for the legitimate version; perform a detailed comparison of hashes, signatures, file size and structure. Any relevant divergence is a strong indicator of binary tampering.
2.3. Static analysis: what can be seen without executing the program. Static analysis means examining the file without running it — crucial to preserve evidence and avoid damage to production systems. A basic static analysis usually includes scanning with antivirus and multi-engine services, extracting strings to locate suspicious file paths, network/registry/code-injection API names and possible C2 URLs or IPs, and inspecting the PE header and sections to detect atypical structures or evidence of packers and obfuscators. The analysis should not be limited to 'see if AV catches something' but read the code and its references in a structured way using disassemblers (IDA, Ghidra), focusing on the import table, code/data sections and strings.
2.4. Controlled dynamic analysis: observing behavior. Dynamic analysis means executing the sample in a controlled environment — typically a virtual machine or isolated sandbox — to observe behavior in real time. NIST guidelines on incident handling recommend recording files created, system changes, processes started and network traffic generated. In a suspicious crack, the expert should pay special attention to the creation of additional executables or scripts in temporary directories, persistent registry changes, outbound connections to unknown domains or IPs, and code-injection attempts into legitimate processes such as browsers or mail clients. Detailed documentation turns the 'simple' crack into a structured evidentiary object that ties pirated software to a specific malware family and criminal infrastructure.
3. Origin of the attack, transnational reach and reference examples. Once malware is established in the pirated copy, the forensic and judicial focus shifts to attribution. Threat-intelligence literature describes attribution as a process combining technical elements (samples, domains, IPs, certificates), observed TTPs and context (message language, compilation time zones, victim selection). It is not always possible to identify a criminal group by name, but several levels of determination can be advanced: (1) infrastructure analysis from network traffic captured during dynamic analysis (DNS records, WHOIS, ASN, hosting providers); (2) classification of the malware family from detection signatures, behavior patterns and reused code; (3) context and activity patterns from previously documented campaigns, language used in admin interfaces, binary compilation times and victim profiles.
Conclusion. Software piracy has evolved from being a purely economic or intellectual property issue into a systematic entry point for the most serious forms of cybercrime. Judges must understand that pursuing only the final manifestations of cybercrime (ransomware, fraud, extortion) without addressing the production and distribution of cracks and pirated software is to ignore the initial link of the criminal chain. Forensic experts, in turn, have proven methodologies to detect, characterize and document the presence of malware in unlicensed software, transforming what might appear to be a simple 'crack' into structured evidence that technically links pirated software with transnational criminal infrastructures.
Source: Christian A. Biniat — softwarelegal.org.ar/pirateria.html (presentation prepared for the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition, IACC).