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Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Is the Pope a pirate?

Is software licensing theft still a problem? Is the Pope a Catholic? Or perhaps more aptly, is the Pope a pirate? The answers are yes, yes and probably not. That said, when security software vendor AVAST decided to track down exactly where one 14 user enterprise software license had ended up after it was discovered on a file-sharing site, it must have been somewhat surprised to find that it cropped up a couple of times in Vatican City.

The original 14 seat Avast! Pro antivirus license was for a small enterprise in Arizona, US and was purchased back in June 2009. Somehow this ended up being distributed by file-sharing and WaReZ sites, and then some. In a matter of just 18 months the license ended up being actively used by no less than 774,651 users instead of the intended 14.
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Co-founder of IT Security Thing Ltd, Davey Winder is a three time winner of the Information Security Journalist of the Year award (2006/2008/2010) and received the prestigious Enigma Award for his lifetime contribution to information security journalism in 2011.



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