Most antivirus I tested, even the paid ones, are so annoying with popups and complaining about cracks that I just take the risk and go without em
Not at all, a crack does something to an executable file that you use. Malware would do the exact same thing.
But you generally want that crack to do something to an executable. Do antivirus etc. tools just heuristically flag everything that looks like it modifies an executable? Lots of legitimate dev tools do that too, so it seems like it’d give a lot of false positives, but I haven’t used Windows in ages so 🤷
Well, how is the system supposed to know that you want the crack to do something to that executable? The anti virus just sees something is happening and flags it. It does not see a difference.