Security risk? Facts?

Of course crack means DRM-free game, what else is it when it removes DRM? And the first thing that our programmer teacher ever taught us was "don't do what has been done before!"
I'm quite sure that when GoG decides to use a crack, they poke around it and look for possible security risks.

u are wrong here, not necessarily does a crack remove a protection. it may simply bypass it, leaving active the protection.
the problem is how reliable is the code of the crack! and for this reason i prefer a DRM game.......

If there's a problem with it, GoG won't use it, I have never encountered any GoG game that wouldn't work offline straight from installation. But if you insist on making brand new problems that no one actually encountered (judging by numerous posts on forums), feel free to do so.

I would tend to be less politically correct and add the (yet) undocumented fails of this OS.

Yah.

Correct me if I am wrong but in the case of Arcanum, the DRM is tied to the physical disk. I can remember that other publishers released patches to get rid of annoyances with the same system. I can see some difference between this and cracks from disputable sources...

These are not the droids you are looking for. Or better said, this doesn't mean what you think it does.

The main problem with cracks, and the principal reason users are directed away from them, is the fact that most of the times they're already infected with a virus/trojan; not that the code of the program represents a security problem (in the end, what most cracks do is provide a reverse engineered file with the DRM routines stripped out, DRM routines which are added after the game is done, so the DRM code and the game-code are mostly independent) but that the sources usually distribute said modified executable already infected.

This means that as long as the crack used is scanned and no virus is detected you're as safe as with the original game, assuming the original code didn't have any security flaws from the start. Well, if you're running a modern OS (read that as Windows 7 or Vista), have an anti-virus software and haven't messed with UAC then you're pretty much set to be safe.

All software has problems and bugs, but MS has taken security seriously since a couple years ago, so seriously that they delay the launch of a product to deal with important bugs.

If you want to read more about the way they handle that you can read the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle which can be found here.

You're right insomuch as to say that a crack doesn't always remove the DRM and it also sometimes results in a less stable game. Perhaps ultimately one that's more annoying than with the DRM in place.

But as stated, GOG wouldn't use cracks if they caused any such problems.

Personally I think that GOG's DRM-free policy will be much more useful when they start providing more 2007+ games in future.

and in my experience the vast majority of security & virus problems stem from idiots who turn off the protection because the alerts were annoying them and they're often the ones who haven't updated the OS since installation

Yep, and that's why if you use the default settings auto-update doesn't ask you anything and even restarts the machine itself if necessary. Too many stupid users out there not doing anything regarding security and getting themselves infected then throwing mud.

"Get your annoying buggy crap the hell away from my computer but not so much that it doesn't grant me complete immunity to every threat ever. Ooh whats this, nudegirls.jpg.exe!"

That was one of my least favourite features of Windows, actually. Countless times, I was away from home and my computer had reset itself, killing the server software I was relying on. Just tell me it's a good idea to update. Even leave an angry icon in the system tray. Oh well, that's in the past.