that's arguing gymnastics

I do seriously ask because I avoid pirating stuff because I'm never sure what's there

and yes, I do believe that shady sites are more likely to add some fancy stuff like coin miners to their stuff than actual e.g game vendors like CDPR and similar.

The risk is always there... but you can always check the hash of the iso, if it's the same as on microsofts site, and then check the crack/patch/activator/... on virustotal.

Movies, series, music,.. are usually in file formats not really suitable to carry malware (unless you click on the movie.mp4.exe, but most tech-savy users, who know how to pirate, also know not to do that).

As an IT security professional, depending on virus total and other sites is a pretty horrible idea. It's trivial to use msfvenom to encrypt a trojan and get it executed on a system, at least for a while until it gets recognized by some cloud platform.

> Movies, series, music,.. are usually in file formats not really suitable to carry malware

A few audio file formats are (practically) Turing-complete, and there have before been bugs in the VMs that allow privilege escalation.