The licence was first purchased by a 14-user firm in Arizona, according to PC Pro. From there, it landed on enough file sharing sites to top out at 774,651 users, spread over 200 countries. According to Avast, two of the computers that installed the program were in Vatican City.
The plug’s been pulled, though; Avast has started putting pop-up notices on machines with the illegally downloaded application that link to the free and paid versions. There have apparently been “some conversions,” but the real value may come from the publicity the story’s generating with posts like this one.
I just enjoy that the pirates went after a product called “Avast!” because of course they did. [PC Pro via Geekosystem]
Todd Drexel
Tuesday, December 7, 2010 at 6:19 PM:3 We ain’t getting caught are we?
I’m one of these people that got it after a simple google search for a anti virus program a couple months ago. Why news about it now though, they should have done something about this much earlier…
Matt
Tuesday, December 7, 2010 at 6:44 PMI can’t believe 1 million people went out of their way to use Avast…
Although some those people are probably users that have been fooled into ‘buying’ avast from a ‘reputable’ dealer who sold them that dodgy licence.
and LOL at Vatican City. SINNERS!! :P
Steve
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 at 10:28 PMIs it really THAT difficult or unacceptable to us the free version? I’ve never paid for antivirus software because of the number of great suites out there.
Note: Switched to Avast from AVG after they dropped the ball with that forced shutdown update.