ChronoPay attempted to reverse engineer Malwarebytes

Malwarebytes has certainly been getting a lot of attention from other companies. In 2009, IOBit decided to take advantage of Malwarebytes definition files by implementing them into their own. Malwarebytes quickly caught wind of this and accused Chinese software firm IOBit so reverse engineering it’s malware signatures. This of course brought about a lot of commotion and IOBit received a lot of negative press. Thankfully, they finally did the right thing and removed Malwarebytes definitions from their own definitions.

Recently, ChronoPay revealed to security researcher and journalist Brian Krebs that they’ve hired programmers to reverse engineer the free version of Malwarebytes in an attempt to create their own anti virus solution. Upon learning this to the researcher published screenshots from a ChronoPay internal system showing that they deal with distributing scareware, selling pirated music, running illegal online pharmacies and much more. When confronted about this, ChronoPay released an official statement denying any involvement in the distribution of scareware. “We assure both our customers and competitors that we have no involvement at all with scareware or malware and warn anyone attacking our company with likes and rumor that we will put the full weight of our company behind the appropriate legal response.”

ChronoPay may be attempting to find a way of evading the Malwarebytes product since they deal with distributing scareware. Another possibility, is that they’re interested in the code to use for one of their own products that they may release in the future. Either way, attempting to reverse engineer someone elses intellectual property without permission is never good news.