Piracy: the jokes are over

As a large IT company, we are concerned about two things related to piracy - retail sales of hacked anti-viruses (some manage to sell pirated versions at retail prices for legal products) and an abundance of resources on the Internet that host a wild number of keys and so-called drugs designed to wean our product from the desire to check the validity of the key. And we continue to fight it.

Any large IT company, including ours, sooner or later faces the problem of piracy. Thirst for freebies is indestructible, and many of the users fundamentally do not want to go on legal purchases of programs. In most cases, this is due to the fact that everyone is accustomed to such a product distribution model. Many of us still have memories of the tent market in the park near the House of Culture named after them. Gorbunova in Moscow, where you could find almost any software for a ridiculous price. The times are changing, the market has not existed for a long time, and many of the old pirates have reoriented their business to trade in legal software.
')
Nevertheless, the level of piracy in the whole country remains quite high. We will not hide, it is pleasant to realize the fact that, as a percentage, the share of legal software has a pronounced upward trend. People prefer to switch either to free products (today you can find an alternative to almost any familiar software), or they buy what they really need.

After weighing all the pros and cons, we decided to inflict several blows on the main centers of piracy in our country. Over the past year, we have been actively cooperating with the Russian Shield Association, which controls all large and small software vendors in Moscow. Thanks to their activities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy an illegal version of ESET NOD32 Antivirus or ESET Smart Security software package every day.

It is no secret that the main center for the distribution of illegal software today is the Internet. This is greatly favored by multiple forums and conferences where you can find anything, and the peer-to-peer networks that have been developing rapidly in recent years. We do not intend to retreat and will deal with this phenomenon. By the way, many of these sites and forums also contain malicious code that penetrates your computers, so visiting such resources can lead to serious problems in the field of information security.

For completeness, we present statistics reflecting the dynamics of our work in this direction. The number of discovered keys is growing steadily, as well as the number of forums where people discuss this or that pirated release. From the graphs it follows that every month we are turning into an increasing number of sources distributing illegal software.