5. Just maybe IObit hired some people to design and code their new product at the time IObit360.
6. Just maybe one of those people came from Malwarebytes. It is not uncommon for techies to switch companies and go to a competitor especially when they are designing a new product and need to staff up. I did the same decades ago when I worked in Hard Drive manufacturing industry. I left Computer Memories and went to work for another disk drive manufacturer which was a startup at the time. I got offered stock and a promotion so I changed companies. No big deal. Done all the time.
Not acceptable.
7. Maybe IObit hired someone from Malwarebytes who stole the signatures of the their own volition before they left. Again not uncommon in the high tech industry, entertainment industry, design industry etc etc.
Not acceptable.
8. Maybe IObit fired the person when they found out and removed the Malwarebytes signatures from IObit360 after they were made aware that some new employee had illegally inserted them.
Why do they never acknowledged that? On contrary...
10. Maybe people will continue to trash IObit over this incident though they might have only been culpable of having poor internal design procedures.
An acknowledge would be enough.
Now we have spyware behavior!
11. Maybe a lot of small and even medium and large high tech software companies have poor internal software design procedures.
Not an excuse for us to avoid such companies. The size is not an excuse.
Obviously its not acceptable. Geez
The point is that maybe the screw-up was not done intentionally by management and unknown to them. Then once they became aware of it the signatures were removed, which we know they were, and whoever was responsible for putting them in the program was fired.
To my knowledge we don't know how those signatures wound up in IObit360, whether it was with or without management knowledge. So it seems to me to to be wrong to condemn the whole company without knowing how the whole thing went down.
Every consumer company screws up in one way or another. There are plenty of ways to steal things especially in high tech. If a company intentionally overpays to higher away someone from another company and with the intent that the newly hired person bring and apply the knowledge that they acquired at their previous company then their new employer is unethical just as much as if they had stolen anti-malware signatures. though the new company may or may not be guilty of a crime defending on what information/knowledge the new employee brought with them.
Note: I am not talking about bringing general knowledge that is available at all companies but that employee happened to learn at the previous company as part of the general increase in knowledge through experience. I am talking about learning something at a company that say falls under intellectual property law and then brings that kind of information to their new company.
If a person has signed a confidentiality agreement when hired by an employer which is very typical in the high-tech industry at least in America, that person could be in violation of the contract and the law if they use any of the information acquired at the old company in the new company. These type of lawsuits happen all the time in high-tech.
So are people going to avoid buying products from every high-tech company that was sued for something like this? If that were to be the case then no one would buy any MSFT products and probably no Apple, HP, Oracle, Cisco etc etc products.
When I see the proof as adjudicated in a court of law either civil or criminal or hear a confession of criminal intent by IObit management then at IObit and still at IObit then I will say that they stole these signatures with intentionally knowing that they were breaking the law and IObit has since done nothing to remove these people from the company.
Until such time, IObit as a company is innocent with regard to intent until proven otherwise.