- #MICROSOFT OFFICE PIRATE STATISTICS INSTALL#
- #MICROSOFT OFFICE PIRATE STATISTICS SOFTWARE#
- #MICROSOFT OFFICE PIRATE STATISTICS CODE#
This report by Microsoft states that 14% of Web or P2P downloads contained viruses, trojans, or keyloggers.
#MICROSOFT OFFICE PIRATE STATISTICS SOFTWARE#
Note the phrasing of "potentially unwanted software", which includes toolbars, which are often bundled with non-pirated software as well. The Risks of Obtaining and Using Pirated Software A Study of Malware in Peer-to-Peer Networks.įrom a 2006 study sponsored by Microsoft:ġ1% of the key generators and crack tools downloaded from Web sites and 59% of the key generators and crack tools downloaded from peer-to-peer networksĬontained either malicious or potentially unwanted software. n Limewire, the top three most prevalent malware account for 99% of all the malicious responses. Our results from over a month of data show that 68% of all downloadable responses in Limewire containing archives and executables contain malware. Advances in Networks, Computing and Communications 3.
#MICROSOFT OFFICE PIRATE STATISTICS CODE#
I wasn't able to find the original paper, but Bruce Hughes seems to have done research regarding malware in Kazaa:īruce Hughes found that about 45% out of 4,778 files he downloaded with Kazaa contained malicious code Dowland & Furnell, 2006. Searching for Malware in BitTorrent.Īpplications like key generation apps seem to be more likely to be infected (which makes sense, as they are smaller, and there is no need to first crack a legitimate program). A Crawler-based Study of Spyware on the Web.ġ8.5% of all downloads contained malware Berns & Jung, 2008. Other categories were "adult" (7.5% contained malware), "celebrity" (7.6% contained malware), "games" (20% contained malware), or "news" (0% contained malware). They classified the websites, and in the category "pirate", 7.1% of the domains contained some malware. Moshchuk et al performed a study were they crawled the web and looked for spyware. The percentage of malware seems to vary greatly based on distribution - eg P2P like Kazaa and Limewire contain more malware than torrents - and type of pirated software. UPDATE: For the sake or narrowing down software, we can exclude operating systems like Windows.įinding statistics for this is rather difficult, but here are some sources that are close (I say close, because most look at platforms that are often used to distribute pirated software, but also to distribute legal software).
#MICROSOFT OFFICE PIRATE STATISTICS INSTALL#
I realize the risk is non-zero, which many would consider good enough to steer clear of P2P networks (I only install software from trusted sources myself), but I'm curious to know how much of this is actually true and how much is just propaganda. There are many anecdotal claims out there on the internet, such as Software Cracks: A Great Way to Infect Your PC, but even the provided stats are vague.įor the sake of this question, only pirated software distributed with malware counts, not completely fake software which are actually just malware in disguise trying to trick people to run it.Īre there hard statistics to backup the claim that actual pirated software commonly contains malware? I've seen plenty of software vendors making this claim over the years, but they have a vested interest in having people believe pirating their software is risky.
I'm curious to know if there are any hard facts to backup this claim.
An often-repeated piece of conventional wisdom goes like the following.ĭon't download pirated software, they often contain malware.