Are cheat engine tables safe?

[cheatenginedead]

This has been bugging me.

I downloaded a table which was completely unreadable gibberish that opened a website and showed me messages, there was also a file it was dropping which was gibberish as well.

All these years we felt safe downloading cheat tables thinking it’s just an open text file and you can read it and understand it and it can’t do anything to computer. But I am really concerned now because this table is completely unreadable, can drop files and execute websites and I don’t know what other things it might have done in background!. What if there’s a bitcoin miner? Or something nasty it dropped. I have to whitelist CE to my antivirus and turn it off.

The scary thing is file monitors/process/network monitors or debuggers can’t read it. You can open any exe in a debugger and see the text but I don’t know how you can do this with an encrypted cheat table since it hides behind CE process.

Exes are not safe but I use mods from trusted few sources who have years of safety record and earn money charging for mods so they don’t gain anything from harming their paying users. But any random person can make these tables.

Can someone knowledgeable please let me know if my worries and concerns are true? Or tables are completely safe? And what is this sorcery they are doing, the table is total gibberish even has “LOL” in it but when I run it, it does those things I mentioned. I don’t understand how, is it protected with vmprotect?

CE installs really nasty malware if you’re not careful so this doesn’t alleviate my concerns at all. All the other mod programs I use you can install with eyes closed and don’t trigger my antivirus.

[unREAL]

wtf?

I never heard from any malicious table here ... can you link the table ( not the table itself, but the topic ) here? so we all, and of course the Mods/Admins, can have a look at it?

[Glowmoss]

As unreal said can you link the post on this site where you found it so we can check it out for anything dodgey. Anything on here should be safe but you can do pretty much anything with a cheat table.

[STN]

Honestly the only real danger is with encrypted tables which is the gibberish I believe you’re referring to and if Dark Byte (author of Cheat Engine) decides to make some proper really difficult encryption then yes you should be worried because even the current encoding CE does, there are very few people who can understand it. Make it more difficult and the list of people who can reverse becomes even smaller and they probably won’t give a shit to spend time reversing and checking if it’s malware or safe. Dark Byte probably hasn’t done it for this reason because it would hurt CE reputation and create distrust among users. I don’t know, just a guess.

I have no shame to admit that I am one of those people who can’t decode CE, maybe if I was arsed enough I would get it but I don’t find it worth my time. I would do these mental gymnastics for something else at this point of my life. There was someone recently who did post encrypted tables and I asked a friend for help to see if it wasn’t malicious.

Any other type of cheat tables are completely safe to use even if they have lua or c code because you can easily read them and understand them. You can open them blindly because CE really isn’t the most efficient way to spread nasties. Even people who encrypt their tables do it just because they want to protect their code but they’re so few and far between because last year the backlash I received for the app was people saying they want others to see their code and modify and share it which the app wouldn’t allow. So yeah it’s just not what people want anyway.

So just ignore encrypted tables if you’re super paranoid, there’s always someone else sharing without nonsense. But FRF staff also goes through and check all content posted to ensure it’s not with any surprises. I mean people have no idea how much of our time is spent doing this because it will hurt FRF’s reputation and that’s the last thing I want.

Lastly as always with anything else, trust matters. Established contributors (the ones with badges/paywalls/patreons etc) you can blindly use their content even if they post exes because they have a lot to lose and malware is just silly. One small dent in their reputation and poof they will be removed or never trusted again. Just ask me, I was unfairly slandered last year and I couldn’t get donations anymore. Reputation is a really difficult thing to develop.

[Csimbi]

As a general rule of thumb: Nothing you download from the internet is safe.

Cheat Tables are not safe at all.
You run CE as admin and you have no idea what the code actually does.
So, I would limit my downloads to sites and authors you trust - same thing STN said above.
In general, the FRF site is safe as there's good and fast feedback and moderation so these 'ill-willed' tables get weeded out real quick and their authors are banned.