📸

  Likewise, you might run a company in a competitive field where you must have access to, say, an Autodesk product. To buy the requisite software and licences for your needs from the company might weigh in at almost $20,000, but if you bought them from this Ukrainian chap on eBay, your total outlay would be $800. Let us be frank: it may be illegal, but it's tempting!

  Since the 1970s, when software started to become commercially available for the first time, manufacturers have tried in vain to develop technology that can prevent it from being copied (as they have also attempted with CDs and DVDs). No such technology has ever lasted more than a few days before being cracked by one of the tens of thou- sands of hackers and crackers around the world. It has proved to be one of the most quixotic branches of the high-tech industry over the past three decades.

  The hackers of Eastern Europe played a particularly important role in cracking security devices placed on software. In the 1980s, before the fall of communism, the Soviet Union had tasked various allies in its trading bloc, COMECON, to develop a personal computer and a software industry — notably Bulgaria and East Germany. The defining characteristics of communist computers were common to all Eastern Bloc consumer products: they were ugly and constantly breaking down. The challenges posed to the region's nascent computer engineers were so considerable that they developed an exceptional ingenuity in over- coming glitches and bugs.

  Furthermore, the software factories that the East Europeans built in the 1980s could not compete with Silicon Valley during the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall — there was no money to invest in research or equipment. But the powerful new organised-crime syndicates that exerted such a huge influence over the economies of the former commu- nist countries saw the factories as a genuine opportunity. First, they acquired these facilities (usually by foul means rather than fair), then they employed those talented engineers to produce counterfeit software on an industrial scale. Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia set the pace, with the Romanians not far behind.

  So when Autodesk spotted that a single seller on eBay was shifting significant numbers of a counterfeited version of their product from Ukraine to buyers in the United States, they naturally felt obliged to do something about it. After some deliberation they called the FBI,

📸