[design] Pirated Creative Suite 3, or, How To Zombify Your Production Machine

839 While hardly a major name in the fight, one of the things I feel passionately about is not succumbing to the lure of pirated or cracked software. The reason range from the principled (software developers deserve to make a living) to the practical (I don't want to go to jail). One can agree with these or disagree.

But what one shouldn't disagree with is that one doesn't want one's machine to become a member of a zombie network. Yet, according to Softpedia, this is just what might happen if you download a certain free key generator to circumvent the protection in Photoshop CS3 Extended:

SophosLabs analysts encountered a Trojan (Troj/Mdrop-BPE) that came bundled with a password key generator and a worm with IRC backdoor functionality. When run, the Trojan not only drops the password generator crack for Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Troj/Keygen-BI) but as an additional freebie, it potentially turns your computer into a IRC zombie machine (W32/IRCBot-WA) as well," Sophos added.

Also peep the referenced Sophos bit, here.

Talk about the gift that keeps on giving. Crack a copy of PSCS3 Ext., join the worldwide spam assault. Bonus!

Or, to hijack another overused joke: Getting an evaluation copy of Photoshop CS3 Extended: Free. Getting a keygen: Free. Sending out Spam whether you want to or not: Priceless.

Yes, it's hard sometimes to scrape together the funds to pay for those tools; they aren't cheap. But it looks like the trouble one could let themselves in for is even more expensive–or will get there.

(Via Adobe's John Nack, of whom I am merely a crumb in the breadbox that is his life, I'm certain).

Tags: Software Piracy, Computer Zombie, Zombie Network, Software Cracks, Photoshop CS3