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There are some employee in company that installed pirated software in their PC and I scared they use for commercial use, so, I decided to use kind of a software to detect whether their PC installed any pirated software or any web site that may help detect??

Any suggestions?

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3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

There is no way to tell whether software is pirated on a technical level, simply because there are many ways to pirate software (registration key generators, patches, etc.).

You could prevent people installing any software at all using a technical solution, which is what I'd suggest.

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erm..sorry for my doubt, what do you mean by technical solution? – NewBirth Jun 2 '11 at 2:02
Remove administrative privileges from users. – Randolph West Jun 2 '11 at 2:50
As I said originally, "there is no way to tell whether software is pirated on a technical level". – Randolph West Jun 2 '11 at 3:16
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A limited/Standard user account cannot install software without credentials or a password....windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/… ..or...technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee623984(WS.10).aspx – Moab Jun 2 '11 at 15:11
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I did say "install", assuming it uses a standard installer. Yes portable applications can be run in a limited account. Nothing is fool proof. – Moab Jun 2 '11 at 16:29
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up vote 1 down vote

Any determination like that would start with a few things:

Install the Microsoft Genuine Advantage tool. That will clearly tell you if you have bogus Microsoft products. http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/diag/

For other items, you are going to have to start with an audit. After the audit, you will have a much better idea of what your company is running compared to what it bought.

Here are some software audit tools: http://www.bsa.org/country/Tools%20and%20Resources/Free%20Software%20Audit%20Tools.aspx

Also, you can use spiceworks: http://www.spiceworks.com/

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how the audit tools stated helping in this situation?? I am so sorry that i am not very understand about it. – NewBirth Jun 2 '11 at 6:44
@KContreau, they are asking about pirated software other than the OS. – Moab Jun 2 '11 at 15:07
The idea is to retrieve a list of any software installed on a user's computer, and comparing that list with the software licenses your company has purchased for use. You would be looking for software that your users have installed, but your company did not buy. This is not entirely fool-proof (portable applications) but about as good as it gets. – Daniel Saner May 18 at 13:29
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up vote 1 down vote

You can use ManageEngine's Desktop Central. It will monitor any new software installation.

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