[Digital-Citizen]

> They have again made statements saying that this tool was only used against pirated copies of their software.

That's quite a claim. But it wouldn't matter if they did apologize. No apology would take away the malware or cause this publisher to have not used the secrecy of proprietary software (and the implicit trust all of their users had in the publisher) to not do what they did.

Too bad for the users who obtained copies (regardless of how) that this claim is utterly unverifiable and ultimately up to the dictates of an organization that already misrepresented its aim to its users -- I'll bet that people who got a copy thought they were getting a flight simulator, not a credentials copier. There's no reason to trust that they're not lying now. And what if FlightSimLabs (or some organization they trust to hold data) inadvertently leaked sensitive information? That's the trouble with trusting organizations to hold sensitive data; they can end up contributing to harm even if they don't intend to do so, or do so accidentally purely by way of making bad decisions about whether to hold the data in the first place and also by bad design of where and how to store the sensitive data.

Proprietary software hides malware (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html for lots of examples), users deserve software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share published software), and users deserve to control their own computers. And this DRM was indiscriminate (as most DRM is): it was installed on all users of the affected program, including on the copies distributed in the manner FlightSimLabs wanted.