[nixgeek]

It looks like the company involved is based in the U.K. and also seems likely this software and their usage of it is a violation of the Computer Misuse Act.

One of their competitors should consider filing a complaint with the relevant authorities, so this gets formally investigated.

[koboll]

Yes, absolutely. The responses so far have been too tepid; DDOSing competitors, adding a database-dropping kill switch, disabling other software, and adding an admin login backdoor are all separate criminal offenses. The developer responsible should not just be blacklisted, he should be in prison.

[gadgetoid]

I would be interested to hear from CloudFlare as to whether there is any possibility of confirming that the URL "https://pipdigz.co.uk/p3/id39dqm3c0_license_h.txt" - fetched by the "license check" code - did at some point return the text "https://kotrynabassdesign.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php". I suspect this will be difficult, or impossible, to verify (I'm not a security expert) and the "license check" code in and of itself (while extremely fishy) only betrays the potential of a DDoS and is not a smoking gun.

[anc84]

Hopefully not. Cloudflare has no business in law enforcement or legal investigations. If they are trustworthy, this will not know about the contents of sites in the past.

[skoskie]

Agreed. Separation of concerns and all that.