Half Life 2:

C1: This is how it always starts. First a building, then the whole block.

C2: They have no reason to come to our place.

C1: Don’t worry, they’ll find one.

From your description, 99% certainty this is a scam that installs some kind of malware along with whatever unlocks the … crack.

Could make you part of a botnet, could be a rootkit, could scan for ids and PID and steal your identity, hijack your accounts, could install a BTC miner, etc etc.

You’re right, there is no reason whatsoever to need a crack to connect to anything else.

Maybe for DRM spoofing purposes it might involve a step where you set up a kind of local fake approximation of a DRM server to do a fake authentication to, something like that, or persistently running a spoofed fake authentication server, but there’s 0 reason for that to not be entirely local and self contained.

Functionally, this is a cracker org doing their own DRM, by hijacking an actual DRM.

Which… is astoundingly ironic, but I’ve seen similar shit amongst various cheat engine / hack developer groups, scam crypto games, various GTAV/RDR2 modding communities, etc.

If you did even just join the Discord server, nuke that that Discord account asap.

Fuck that, follow your leader:

No really, bully them into suicide.

People asking me for help on security reviews, believe me when I say I did little more than the basics - the project was terrible.

Well, sometimes you have to just have someone who has the time/willingness to actually do the basics.

Unfortunately, hype and groupthink and all kinds of silliness … or incompetence… can get in the way of that.

Great writeup!

As has been said before, and will be said again:

Fuck The Police.

They exist to enrich themselves, have a powertrip as a day job, gain a higher effective class of citizenship, and to protect the property rights of the oligarchs.

Anything else they ever do is basically an accident, an incidental, occasional side effect stemming from the particular manner in which they carry out their actual purposes for existing.