Adobe secretly modifies your hosts file for the stupidest reason – OSnews

If you’re using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you’ll want to take a look at your Hosts file. It turns out that Adobe adds a bunch of entries to the Hosts file, for a very silly reason.

When you visit their website they use this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed.

When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript:

https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png

If a DNS entry exists in your hosts file, your browser will connect to their servers so they know you have installed Creative Cloud, otherwise the load fails, which they detect.

They simply hit http://localhost:/cc.png which connects directly to your Creative Cloud app, but then Chrome started blocking local network access, so they had to hack this hosts file instead.
↫ thenikdude on reddit

At what point does a commercial software suite become malware?