V.i. Labs Software Protection Blog

Organized Crime Adopts Software Piracy

A anti-piracy raid uncovers organized crime links. Further evidence of how piracy has evolved from a hobby to a an illegal business. Crime syndicates would not be interested in piracy unless it was easy and profitable. There have been other studies that reiforced this. The below chart from UK National Criminal Intelligence Service data in 2004 showed the mark up associated with piracy goods when compared to Heroin and Cocaine was higher and had far lower risk of getting caught.

License enforcement gone wrong

Interesting post that describes how to subvert an anti-virus vendors'  weak license enforcement to shut down the AV functions.  Clearly mission critical applications like AV have consider better approach that does not introduce new vulnerabilities.

-Vic

Legitimate face of piracy

I constantly receive spam with "too good to be true" prices on high end software. Most likely a by-product of my piracy Web research. However when I visit some of these sites I am impressed with the legitimate look and feel of their on-line stores (see screen shot of an example). I can certainly see an a novice software buyer purchasing from this site and unknowingly pirating software. When I did a whois on this specific example Web site it of course pointed back to China.

Vic