VMProtect is technically not a “virus” it is a heuristic detection saying that the program is implemented in a highly suspicious way that makes it impossible to confidently determine what it actually does, and thus it could contain a virus (and viruses often use exactly this technique to hide themselves) since there is no reason for a legitimate program to do it. That said, a crack is also not a legitimate program, and sometimes to avoid the defenses of the cracked program it has to do things to obscure what it’s doing too, and sometimes that results in a false positive heuristic detection like this.

That said, we really have no way of knowing which of the two situations this is, and neither do you, and neither does AppDoze.com really. I would personally not be willing to trust it, and if I had to run it, would do so on a dedicated and isolated machine with limited access and nothing of value on it, permanently, even if it seemed fine. Any program which needs to be cracked in such a serious way is software that I am highly inclined to find an alternative for if possible. It’s not worth the potential risk and headache to me.

Any reason you need this specific software? Seems like it has a fairly generic use case, also possible with free / open source software

It’s difficult to say. Short answer is I wouldn’t trust it.

Vmprotect is a piece of DRM that obfuscates the underlying code by running the software within a custom virtual machine that makes reverse engineering the software much more challenging.

This method is sometimes used to obfuscate the actions of malicious code from being detected by security tools. I would be wary of running anything using this even if I was 100% sure I could trust the source.

If the source is unknown as it is here, I would definitely not trust it.

You’re mixing two things:

First, you’re right this file I personally would not trust and keep quarantined.

I don’t know Malwarebytes but Windows Defender back in the day only would get active on files you or your system interacted with -> would make sense that you only get one alarm. In addition, windows was notoriously bad with multiple virus scanners as they themselves show infection patterns in their behavior,(who else than a virus and a scanner wants to access literally everything you do?). So: i would err on the side of caution.

But then there’s the question about the source. And here I can only ask you to be more careful: never trust a source more than your own defense layers. Even the most reputable file sources will have things that will harm you - including the Microsoft Windows updates themselves by the way.

But here it’s more critical: don’t trust pirate sites. Ever. No matter how good their reputation.

Oh and yadda yadda Linux blah but someone else will give that talk I assume ;)

Stay safe!