Software piracy expands beyond Microsoft

In early July 2026, online posts began offering cracked installers for Microsoft Project Professional and Microsoft Office 365, promoting portable activation tools and key generators that claimed to bypass licensing checks. By late July the illicit market widened to include a 2016 Professional Plus ARM Italian edition and an ultra‑lite Office 2019 package for x64/x86 systems, extending the range of pirated Microsoft products and regions. On 21 July 2026 the piracy network posted cracked builds of Microsoft Office 2025 ARM64 and Microsoft 365 ARM alongside non‑Microsoft software such as Adobe Illustrator 2024, the game Spider‑Man: Miles Morales, a Neat Video Pro plug‑in and a PC version of Star Wars Outlaws. Listings provided hash checks, system‑requirement details and download links, and were traced to sources in France, Italy, Spain and North Macedonia. Two days later, on 23 July 2026, additional postings advertised a patched “NewsLeecher” Usenet client and a German‑language cracked Microsoft 365 (x86) package labelled “Minimal Setup MAS Active Script.” Both entries included explicit hash values, hardware specifications (≈1 GHz CPU, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB disk) and embedded activation scripts, demonstrating the continued diversification of the underground distribution effort. That same day, uploads shared a full‑release Windows version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Special Edition (GOTY), a cracked Word‑to‑PDF converter for both x86 and x64, and a high‑resolution (4K/8K) copy of the film The Last Sunrise 2026 in BRRip and CAMRip formats. On 22 July 2026 a cracked portable version of ConvertXtoDVD was posted, identified by hash e23f3e8528090a363ea0312623b9c6ef and advertised with modest hardware requirements (≈1 GHz CPU, 2‑core, 4 GB RAM, 64 GB disk).