Software pirates are getting bolder and more sophisticated according to a new paper from Microsoft on the subject.

The main study discussed in the paper is of 30 medium-sized businesses in the U.K. which were audited by a third-party review agency at Microsoft's behest, something which the paper says happens thousands of times a year. The subset of 30 received additional scrutiny of any counterfeit products detected in the review. Eleven, or 37 percent of the 30, were found to have unknowingly purchased counterfeit Microsoft software, including both Windows and Office. The products they bought were high-quality rip-offs, and you'd have to know what to look for in order to identify it.

The paper focuses on midsize businesses that were trying to be legitimate but failed. It also discusses other studies of consumer and small business problems with pirated software, where the risks seem to be much greater. Consider the recent incident of the Mac botnet that was built with pirated applications distributed on peer-to-peer sites. Obviously things like that happen in the Windows world all the time, and these days people are probably all the more inclined to save some money, or so they think, by ripping off some faceless, wealthy software corporation.

The report describes how the sites that push pirated programs are full of exploits, how the pirated programs themselves (as with the Mac example) have exploits in them, and generally you're taking inordinate risks, even putting morals aside, in getting your software this way.

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