alt Hacker NewsThe scheme to damage hardware or data when Prolok Plus thinks someone's using a pirated copy seems ludicrous. Who wants to deal with the liability when this goes wrong due to a bug or unexpected circumstances?
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charcircuit • yesterday at 6:44 AM
It seems like it only deletes pirated software. It is hard to understand what they actually claimed it to do without there being an actual source.
"Bright" ideas were and always will be a thing in copy protection mechanisms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... for a much newer example, albeit non-destructive. I vaguely remember some much more recent destructive examples, not sure if implemented or threatened, but I might be confusing things.
Edit: Found the incident I was thinking about using Gemini. A flight sim addon company FSLabs shipped malware with their installer. It didn't wipe data, it stole your Chrome password manager instead. https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/xa58qz/a_retrosp... is a reddit summary, https://forums.flightsimlabs.com/index.php?%2Fannouncement%2... the company explaining/justifying what they did and why (TL;DR it was meant to be a targeted attack against some specific pirates).