Pirated software leading to client vulnerabilties

Yes it does, at least according to a recently released report by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) which basically correlates data on the known piracy rates for particular countries and their malware infection rates, using public sources.

The rationale behind their claims is fairly simple - users relying on pirated copies of software also do not have access to the latest, often critical from a security perspective, updates issued by the vendors, and are therefore susceptible to client-side vulnerabilities.

How biased are BSA’s claims, or are the report’s claims in fact real, emphasizing on how millions of users relying on pirated Windows copies are usually the first to become part of a botnet?


Infection distribution data for the poster child of patch management failure on a global scale, Conficker, speaks for itself, at least in respect to the report’s claims. At the beginning of the year, Symantec also made a connection between the high piracy rates of the most affected countries, and contributed their high infection rates to the user’s inability to obtain the released patches “: