Hello Fellow GoG'ers :)

I bought Apache Air Assault for PC yesterday in a Charity shop & I was searching for patches for the game. I found the last patch for it 1.0.0.2 on a site called Brother Games, now I have not heard of this site before, but google searching for the patch brings this site up as the top answer for it, plus a few other results. Gajin don't seem to host the patch anymore on their site.

I ran the downloaded exe through Virus Total & it was flagged up in two of the results as a W32/IRCBot-based!Maximus, all other results were clean.

Opinions please, as to whether this patch exe is safe to use, as I know some of you on here are more tech savvy about these things .

Google search for the patch


Had to make another post for the last 2 pics.

I'd say it's a false positive. If you are really afraid, why don't you try it in a virtual machine first?

Do virus and malware generally expose themselves right away, or do they often try to stay hidden in the system, doing whatever they are supposed to be doing (being inactive until someone calls your PC to join a DDOS attack bot army, or use your PC occasionally for bitcoin mining, or logging your keystrokes, or whatever)? Even ransomware virus would probably wait sometime before triggering itself.

So, I am unsure how first checking a file in a virtual machine necessarily helps to get any confirmation about anything. If I need to find a patch to an old retail game, I usually head to this site:

http://www.patches-scrolls.de/

It usually seems dependable and keeps (or at least tries to?) keep only legit updates for old games. However, searching with the keyword "Apache", I didn't find anything on that site for "Apache Air Assault". It had patches for "Apache Longbow" and "Apache Havoc".

Also, which of these games specifically is the game you have?

http://www.mobygames.com/game/apache-air-assault_

http://www.mobygames.com/game/ah-64-apache-air-assault

I do. You can install your software in a vbox and spend another few years scanning virtual system for possible complications ; )
On Windows I'm getting false positive every other time playing around with packers and even often fooling around with headers. One positive does not make the patch virus.
I've checked patches scrolls before my post and couldn't find the patch for mentioned game.

edit:
Another way around could be unpacking the patch manually and patching the game also manually. This involves some more work. Few ways to achieve the goal, one of them could be mentioned virtual machine.

Two? I can only see Cyren...

Anyway, I agree. Based on the fact that it is an old file (2010?) and this "Cyren" is uncommon, I'd say this is 98% a false positive. Now, if you really feel it's something worth investigating you could use http://constexpr.org/innoextract/ and inspect the content even further.

You should also run the test multiple times.

Like mike_cesara mentioned it's pretty easy to set up VirtualBox and install it with running a file/register checker in the background to see what the exe files is doing, either live one or something that compares them post-install.

EDIT: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon (fomerly regmon and filemon) is one such tool.

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-sysinternals-tools-you-shouldnt-be-without/

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/tracking-registry-and-files-changes-when-installing-software-in-windows/

PS: You can also dl from other sources (like the google storage one) and compare them with md5. I mean, there are literally several roads to investigate a file(s).

There is an activation patch for the game on Gaijin's website, but it looks like the patch your looking for was only ever released on Yuplay. This is assuming your talking about Gaijins Apache Air Assault. Im usually the type to say its all false positives, but something about this seems off. Im not necessarily saying I think its is a virus. Its just... I don't know. I don't like that brother site. It looks like its the sort of place where they bundle spyware and toolbars and crap with the installers. Do you need the patch? Maybe its just a multiplayer patch or something.

I have now got the patch from the yuplay site instead, as I wasn't going to chance it from Brother Games.

Thank you though The Google doc one got flagged by Chrome as a malicious download, so that was a no no for me.

Thank you for the reply as well. Thank you for all the replies, it has to be activated through yuplay & it didn't say anything about that on the back of the box. Game has already been activated & I can't use it........ oh well :(. Hopefully it will come here one day instead.

I will message a blue & see if I can get you all marked as the solutions to this question.

Thanks again for all your help.

I have that game on PS3. Its pretty fun, but its also nothing special. No big loss.

Sorry to hear that, happened to me as well in the past. Those days you can't rely on hard copies I'm afraid..
No worries, there are plenty of games here you can enjoy without dozens of clients and accounts ; )

In my experience, more than half of the games you see for sale 2nd hand are like that, you cannot use them at all.