This Mac hacker’s code is catching corporations attention who are using it without permission

On Thursday, Patrick Wardle who is known for being a Mac malware specialist’s software code is now freely available to download and decompile and some of this code has grabbed the attention of technology companies that are using it without its permission.

On Thursday, Wardle will be putting his case in a presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference with Tom McGuire, a cybersecurity researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

The researchers have found out that the code written by Wardle and released as open-source has made its way into a number of commercial products over the years — all without the users crediting him or licensing and paying for the work.

Wardle believes that the problem is difficult to prove that the code was stolen rather than being executed in a similar way by coincidence.

Fortunately, because of Wardle’s skill in reverse-engineering software, he was successful in making more progress than most.

Wardle told The Verge  in a call before the talk that he was only able to figure [the code theft] out because he both had written tools and reverse engineer software, which is not super common. As he straddles both of these disciplines, he could find it happening to his tools, but other indie developers might not be able to, which is the concern.