SINGAPORE—After supporting moves offline against pirated CDs and DVDs, Microsoft Corp. is bringing the war against those behind illegal software on the cold waters filled with hackers: the Internet.
“Using pirated software expose users to a plethora of cyber threats,” Biplab Sikdar of the National University of Singapore (NUS) told reporters Microsoft flew here from seven markets in Asia.
“Although the risk of containing malware through all sources of pirated software is high, the online medium is turning out to be a more potent infection vector,” added Sikdar, associate professor from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the NUS Faculty of Engineering. “[The online medium] not only provides cybercriminals with the scale to attack anybody, anywhere, anytime, it also allows them to easily camouflage their malicious activities and attack remotely,” he said.
Sikdar led the study that discovered 100 percent of web sites hosting pirated software download links are exposing users to multiple security risks. The risks, according to Sikdar, include advertisements with malicious programs.
Citing the Business Software Alliance (BSA), Sikdar said 3 in 5 personal computers in Asia Pacific were found to be using nongenuine software in 2016. The BSA, to note, is a trade group established by Microsoft in 1988.
Jeffrey Avina, Microsoft Asia Pacific and Japan regional director for government affairs, said here on Wednesday that 60 percent of users worldwide run pirated software.
The study commissioned by Microsoft analyzed 90 new laptops and computers, as well as 165 software CDs and DVDs with pirated software. According to Sikdar, the samples were randomly purchased from vendors that are known to sell pirated software from across eight countries in Asia: Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam.
Sikdar added he and student-volunteers also examined 203 copies of pirated software downloaded from the Internet.
“Some of my students even admitted they, too, were using pirated software,” he said, adding 3 in 10 users in Singapore do so.
Sikdar’s team also noted 24 percent of the malicious programs bundled with the pirated software downloads deactivated the antimalware software running on the computer.
“Once the antimalware engine is blocked, the downloaded malware installs itself on the computer.”
The NUS team also discovered that 92 percent of new and unused computer that had pirated software installed were pre-infected with malware. According to Sikdar, these computer samples were purchased from vendors that are known to sell nongenuine software.
“The buyer could have been offered with a preloaded unit or was enticed by the vendor to have some software installed that unwittingly were accepted as genuine by the buyer.”
Sikdar added that out of the DVDs and CDs samples acquired for their study, 3 in 5, or 61 percent contained malware. He said infected discs contained an average of five pieces of malicious software. In some cases, as many as 38 malware instances were found in just one DVD.
“Some may believe they saved SGD75 by buying pirated software,” Sikdar said. “But the consequences, the costs, of getting hacked are more than that.”