So this is an interesting one: a flight simulator software program had malware purposely built-in to capture passwords. But really, the company says, it was after just one set of passwords: those belonging to the most frequent pirate of its software.
It caused quite a weekend uproar on social media when a user discovered the "test.exe" file, so Flight Sim Labs clarified what it was up to—battling a software pirate.
And the strategy was successful, according to the company's Lefteris Kalamaras.
"What is very ironic here was that this method worked, in fact, and we were able to receive this information. We discovered with dismay that behind this person, there was an entire web of operations that had been set up that not only provided an interested person with a pirate copy of our product, but it used its own eSellerate key generators together with offline activators (by changing the activation server IP addresses to match the pirate servers) that would validate those keys directly. Apart from our company, there was a whole host of other flight simulator developer companies whose products were being shared and offline keys generated."
The company apologized online:
"First of all—there are no tools used to reveal any sensitive information of any customer who has legitimately purchased our products. We all realize that you put a lot of trust in our products and this would be contrary to what we believe.
You can see the company's complete explanation here. It has now released a new version of its installer without the malware.