Post by Baron von Lotsov on Nov 4, 2024 17:56:00 GMT
A little story for you.
It starts with a company in the US. I can't recall the name, but apparently it was a pretty slick operation and they produced a professional network program that they sold to corporate clients. This would not in any way be cheap crap. It was developed for a demanding application and had a whole team of professional developers who produced it.
One day they got a nasty surprise. Some dodgy gits from Hackers R Us, the type who distribute viruses, steal passwords and god knows what, they successfully ripped off the entire source code. The firm found out via a ransom note. It was along the lines of you pay us a huge sum of money and that will be that. You won't be bothered by us again. They added that if you don't pay up we will sell your software. Their reply was great, be our guests. Go ahead and sell our software. It was basically telling them to sod off and you will not get a penny out of us.
As time passed, they compiled it, got it working and then proceeded to sell the product themselves. The firm said by the time they had got the code it was already 20 versions ahead, so to start with the pirates had an out of date program which would become progressively more out of date as time went on. No worries they thought, as they had the source they could update it themselves. The program was highly complex and structured. If you want to extend such a piece of code you have to understand the way the software is designed. All they had was the code and no one to ask who had ever worked on it. To understand the operation of a complex program it is very difficult to do it just by looking a the code that runs into 100s of thousands of lines and often millions.
So because they did not understand how to add new features in a highly organised framework, they wrote dirty code that just tagged onto it without properly integrating into it. This caused bugs. You might now see where this is leading! Add in a few hacker like dodgy features like backdoors, spyware and the like and the code does not look too tasty. Meanwhile over in the marketplace, users caught wind of rip-off versions of the software which was known to contain bugs and more. They demanded the original. I think in the end the hackers got what was coming to them, possibly even a knock on the door.
