Adobe has a free tool for you: its anti-piracy DRM!

It turns out, the American multimedia software giant Adobe that is known for its creative products including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and Acrobat, has a free tool.

This week, music artist Cabel Sasser tweeted that he learned of a process that Adobe runs persistently in the background to catch any of its users running bootleg versions of Adobe apps:

“But please don’t be concerned: it’s free! lol,” said Sasser.

The tool Sasser refers to is Adobe Genuine Service that periodically verifies whether Adobe apps running on a machine are genuine and notifies the user, should that not be the case.

Multiple vulnerabilities reported in Adobe Genuine Service

Today, infosec. reporter, Sergiu Gatlan pointed out that Adobe’s Genuine Service doesn’t come clean, and that over time multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in the software:

This includes a recently reported privilege escalation vulnerability in the Adobe Genuine Service, tracked as CVE-2021-28568. Similar vulnerabilities have been reported in the product over time.

And, mind you, both Adobe Genuine Software Service and “Software Integrity Service” remain on your computer even if all other Adobe products were uninstalled:

While vulnerabilities lurking in software is a hardly surprising finding, what remains ironic is that users installing legitimately purchased Adobe products are inadvertently becoming victims to this anti-piracy “freeware” (spyware?) utility which itself has some issues to tackle.

If you are a legitimate Adobe customer (and you know that you are!), and want to get rid of Adobe’s Genuine Service designed to (paradoxically) monitor if you are running counterfeit Adobe software, you can follow the uninstall instructions.