Users say Adobe Creative Cloud rewrote hosts file to detect installed app

Oh helllll no. Let's imagine an analogy for Adobe leadership:

1. You hired a night janitor to clean and vacuum your executive offices.

2. That janitor secretly stops at every desk-phone to alter the settings of voicemail accounts.

3. After the change, any external caller can dial a certain sequence to get a message of "Yes, this office was serviced by Adobe Janitorial!"

What's your reaction when you discover it? Do you chuckle and say something like "boys will be boys"? No! You have a panic-call, Facilities revokes access, IT starts checking for other unauthorized surprises, HR looks into terminating contracts, and Legal advises whether you need to pursue data-breach notifications or lawsuits or criminal charges.

* Is it acceptable because they had some permission to touch objects in the rooms? No.

* Is it acceptable because the final effect is innocuous? No.

* Is it acceptable because the employment contract had some vague sentence about "enhancing office communication experiences"? No.

* Is it acceptable if they were just dumb instead of malicious? No.

No person that would blithely cross those lines can be trusted near your stuff, full-stop.

A couple of other user-hostile Adobe practices I've encountered:

- About 5 years ago I pretty much shat a brick as the person in charge of IT at a healthcare org when I discovered that by default Creative Cloud stored copies of any documents edited within an Adobe cloud account - with no opt-in, and the only way to override on Windows was with a registry hack that IIRC we couldn't automate via Group Policy. Basically "HIPAA Breach As A Service"

- If you want to free yourself from the tyranny of Adobe products and subscriptions, good on you, but: be sure (on Windows at least several years ago) to not uninstall from "Windows Add & Remove Programs"...go through the Adobe un/installers...if you don't you can still remove the apps but they phoned home and we got charged until I re-installed the programs and used the Adobe uninstallers.

I think allowing any software installer to install a persistent/background process with root/admin privs (which is apparently how this works) is a major security problem since it essentially provides full access and control over anything on the device, forever.

I have a feeling there are tons of app installers that do this.

All of the pirated Adobe installs require host file changes to redirect the license calls to local or nonexistent IPs. Maybe by Adobe adding this, it enables them to track pirated installs, since presumably the new host entry would reestablish the creative cloud connection...

Would be interesting to hear if any previously working cracked installs were broken...

I was trying to root out Creative Cloud a few weeks back and it just refused to go away. Turns out there's a separate cleaner tool that you have to download to uninstall Creative Cloud:

https://helpx.adobe.com/in/creative-cloud/apps/troubleshoot/...

It's odd the platform is never mentioned. I have LR and CC installed (the latter is impossible to remove, IIUC) and no /etc/hosts mods. I'm on macOS.

With the pressure from diffusion we will see more questionable business practices from Adobe and they weren't a saint before.