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INTERNET LIFE

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended Crack Harvests Zombie Computers

- And builds IRC machine botnets

By: Marius Oiaga, Technology News Editor

A crack designed to activate Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 3 Extended brings to the table a tad more than the users have bargained for. When it comes to pirated materials, there is no such thing as free. This truism is reinforced by the Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended keygen authored by "macROSS." The Key generator is being offered as a free method to circumvent the activation mechanism of Photoshop CS3 Extended.

While the genuine products from Adobe come with consistent price tags, Photoshop
CS3 is available for $649 and Photoshop CS3 Extended for no less than $999, the key generator is completely free. Well, the fact of the matter is that free is more of a concept, and it applies strictly to financial transactions. Because the Photoshop CS3 crack from "macROSS" is anything but free, and it will end up costing users more than a legitimate license.

"Password crackers and key generators have long been the bane of commercial software companies because they allow users to circumvent their protection mechanisms without the need to purchase their software. As a result, it should come as no surprise that some malware authors prey on this particularly vulnerable group of users," SophosLabs warned.

Free product keys for Photoshop CS3 are used as incentive in a social engineering scheme designed to convince unsuspecting users looking for a "free ride" to download and execute the code on their machine. Once a user deploys the Photoshop CS3 Extended keygen, his computer won't be "his computer" any longer.

"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.

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29th May 2007, 09:30 GMT | Copyright (c) 2007 Softpedia | Contact:
Read by 189,667 user(s) | Rating: | 28 vote(s) so far | Cast your vote:
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended Crack Harvests Zombie Computers - USER OPINIONS

Comment #1 by John Doe on 2008-01-09, 13:15 GMT reply to this comment 
This is indeed true and has been going on for some time. I would question the fact that this is a social engineering attack as, deceptive as it may be, conventional methods would tend to be initiated by the attacker, whereas the victim in this case would be looking for something and not "minding their own business" so to say.

It is only in cases where innocent users of shared computers become victims from these attacks that I have sympathy for the victim. People who use such software are intending on breaking the law by infringing copyright.

These sorts of attack are not confined to the keygenerator designed by macROSS for Adobe CS3, but are spread across various pieces of software, P2P networks and malicious websites.

If you are reading this and you have used such software, don't be lulled in to a false sense of security by the anti-virus or firewall you may have installed on your computer. Modern more-sophisticated trojans are designed to stop/corrupt/disable such software, sometimes without it even being evident. Hardware firewalls (such as those on routers) are ineffective againt reverse connection software. I'm not going to give advice as to how to protect yourself. Don't be a knock off Nigel, buy the software and stay out of trouble.

Comment #2 by Michael Knights on 2008-03-16, 01:32 GMT reply to this comment 
Or just get gimp its free and photoshop is full of crap anyway to be wasting you time try to crack it.

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