Cracked copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop steal your session cookies, browser history, crypto-coins Cracked copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop are stealing browser session cookies and Monero cryptocurrency wallets from tightwads who install the pirated software, Bitdefender has warned. As many Reg readers will no doubt be aware, cracked software is a legitimate application that has had its registration or …
LibreOffice? What's the other L in LOL for?
A legit copy of Office costs a couple of quid. How much of a cheapskate are you?
GIMP is quite good, but most people probably don't need most of the functionality, so are better off avoiding the torturous UI and using Pixlr.com or similar.
For a typical MS Office user the difference is persistent transparent keystroke monitoring vs anything-goes loss of control. Obviously the former is preferable because having your data encrypted is the worst.
For others (the minority) there is no need to use MS Office, or such cloud usage can be isolated when absolutely necessary (e.g., working in collaboration with typical MS office users online).
I think you know that.
Running cracked software means trusting both the original developer and some random cracker. Not sure that's "much safer than always-online cloud nonsense." In either case you have no idea where your personal info will end up.
And who's to say that the cracked software doesn't still send telemetry to MS / Adobe / whoever?
"And who's to say that the cracked software doesn't still send telemetry to MS / Adobe / whoever?"
You missed the part where he said "offline". An offline machine isn't sending telemetry to anybody. Software that only works online obviously is.
MS Office works offline - at least, the versions before 365 did.
You can perfectly install MS Office 2016 and then unplug your computer from the Internet. That being said, I seriously doubt anyone posting in forums has disconnected his work PC from the Internet. If you're using Office, you're not just using Excel to do your monthly bank balance.
From install to day to day usage, my development machine never touches the internet.
Deterministic behavior can only come from remaining offline and I crack all software that does not allow me to do so.
Of course I have an online VM machine called "cesspit" which I do my day to day online crap with.
Also my banking is done quite differently than using their little website ;)
"Running cracked software means trusting both the original developer and some random cracker"
The random cracker often disables some telemetry to the upstream companies (as part of the crack). Also, don't think that you just have the original developer to worry about. For example Microsoft office contains a lot of middleware sending to a whole heap of 3rd parties (and advertisers). Honestly chucking in a random cracker is of no consequence at this (already unacceptable) point.
I do beg to differ.
vi is free (as in both "beer" and "speech". I very much doubt it is harvesting any data.
The quotation marks around "free" in your post are likely deliberate (so: sorry, I get your point, could not resist etc), and likely refer to anything G**gle or F'book (F'thagn-book?) or so. Yes, I do agree :)
Sure, free software used to be written to help people do things - but these days "free" software serves the users advertisements, sells their data, and occasionally cracks their wallets if the "free" access is a result of someone hacking the registration. I've got a few free applications out there that people use but they were all written back in the old days to help people.
If I was trying to fund their replacements today then the corporate management would be telling me to harvest user data.
Sadly I've not found a spreadsheet app that will handle very large tables or complex lookup updates with nearly(*) as good performance as Excel. The only sense in which the open source options are better is that if I wanted to fix the performance issues in theory I could.
(*) Not even within an order of magnitude in some cases.
I may have mislead you with the word 'Very'. We're only talking a few hundred columns (not even hitting Calc's much hated col limit) by less than a hundred thousand rows. Excel proves perfect for the job every time, and is only one step in a toolchain that probably includes whatever you're thinking is the correct tool.
Nevertheless they prove very large from the perspective of other spreadsheet software.
I take it you've never tried to mail merge in LibreOffice? In MS Office you can just insert a CSV file, LIbreOffice requires you convert the CSV into a database then insert it and even then it doesn't work very well.
I use LibreOffice for spreadsheets, presentations and opening MS Office file formats but for serious work MS Office is better. I can't think of any 'advanced' feature that's easier in LibreOffice.
It seems clear to me. Cracked version with malware built in are likely to be flagged up by your anti-malware software when you run the installer or the app itself. Some people will ignore the warning because, for some reason, they "trust" the pirated app more than the anti-malware warning flashing on the screen, hence the "in plain sight" comment.
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The good old days. The dawn of the New Information Highway, with plenty of people who wanted to show off their skills and make sure that you could run Settlers 2 or Battlefield Vietnam without needing to have the disk in the optical reader.
Bless them. They made my gaming life easier - without depriving authors of their revenue. Yes, I still have my Settlers 2 install CD. And Battlefield Vietnam, and about 600 others. I even bought two Battlefield 2 games because I played it so much that my first gamedisk shattered in the player. So much for my right to a license - in a normal world, I would have sent the pieces back and got a new DVD - because I only have license, right ? My license does not expire with the death of the disk.
So yeah, warez used to be good, until the crooks understood that they could distribute their version of a CD/DVD crack and include a nasty little package with it. It really didn't take all that long for the despicables to catch on.
Nowadays, warez is synonymous with malware. Thankfully, games no longer need to have a bloody plastic disc in a reader. Unfortunately, they do need to phone home every few minutes.
Progress ?
The warez scene affected legit copies detrimentally though. I have a few old games that refuse to run because they detect I have a program for creating virtual drives installed. As if there isn't a legitimate reason for using a virtual drive. Luckily it's not many and it's on my XP gaming machine which is only used for LAN RTS gaming my mate when they visit.
Blame lazy DRM devs, not the warez scene for that though. Thankfully in most cases, it's trivial to apply a crack that both allows your virtual drive to work, and ditches the need for the optical media.
I've applied many cracks to games I legitimately own over the years - mainly to stop me either having to dig around for the CD each time (just to prove I own the game), or to enable me to take a laptop with a few games on it when I travel.
"Sometime after this, the user seems to have downloaded and installed pirated software on their machine, specifically a Microsoft Office ISO file and an illegal Microsoft Office 2013 activation tool (aka “keygen”)."
SOURCE:
https://usa.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2017_kaspersky-lab-publishes-results-of-internal-investigation-related-to-incident-with-equation-apt-source-code
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