IOBit Caught Stealing The Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware Database

Malwarebytes, the company best known for their Anti-Malware product made a post on their site today warning its customers that IOBit, a Chinese company, has been stealing their (Malwarebytes’) database and implementing it within IOBit’s own software.  According to Malwarebytes President and CEO, Marcin Kleczynski, they have conducted a thorough and in-depth investigation before making these accusations against IOBit.

After Malwarebytes came across a post on the IOBit forums that showed the IOBit Security 360 software flagging a specific key generator for Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware software using the exact naming scheme Malwarebytes themselves use to flag such keygens: Don’t.Steal.Our.Software.A. the suspicions arose.

“Why would IOBit detect a keygen for our software and refer to it using our database name?”, said Mr. Kleczynski.

A good question, indeed. Malwarebytes took additional investigative steps and created “fake definitions” for a “fake rogue” application they created (meaning it doesn’t actually exist at all so no one should be finding it) and added them into their database. And sure enough, within two weeks IOBit had the same exact detection of these fake files under almost exactly the same fake names.

Obviously, Malwarebytes has been wronged here.  Their intellectual property has been infringed upon.  I spoke with Marcin earlier today, who said they may be sending the company’s web host (since their website is hosted in the US) a DMCA take down notice which will bring the website down (assuming the host complies), however, it is very likely even if the site is taken down that the very same company will sprout up a few weeks later under a different name and a new website.

What I would recommend we all do is email the major download sites such as Download.com and MajorGeeks and inform them of what is going on and request that IOBit’s software be removed from their sites.

More in-depth analysis of their investigation can be found here along with screenshots.