Adobe Is Rewriting Your Hosts File and Calling It a Feature

Here’s a fun little discovery making the rounds: if you have Adobe Creative Cloud installed on Windows or macOS, there are entries in your /etc/hosts file you didn’t put there. Adobe put them there. Quietly. Without asking.

The entries point to detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com. When you visit adobe.com/home, their JavaScript tries to load an image from that domain: https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png. If the DNS entry in your hosts file resolves — meaning you have Creative Cloud installed — the request succeeds and Adobe knows you’re already a customer. If it fails, they know you’re not.

That’s it. That’s the whole reason. They’re detecting existing customers via a covert hosts file modification so they can tailor the website experience.

Let that sink in.

A Brief History of Adobe’s Increasingly Unhinged Approach

This wasn’t always how they did it. Adobe originally fired requests at http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png — directly hitting the Creative Cloud helper service running on your machine. Sketchy, sure, but at least it was contained to localhost. Then Google rolled out Local Network Access restrictions in Chrome, blocking websites from reaching localhost without explicit permission. A sane company would’ve said “okay, we need a different approach” and maybe, I don’t know, used a login cookie or an API call.

Adobe said: “hold my $600/year subscription fee” and modified the hosts file instead.

The actual hack is almost impressive in how convoluted it is:

1. CC installer writes detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com → some IP into /etc/hosts
2. Adobe’s website loads an image from that domain via JavaScript
3. Browser honors the hosts file entry and connects to Adobe’s server
4. Adobe logs the successful connection: you have Creative Cloud
5. Adobe tailors the website accordingly

They turned your hosts file into a surveillance mechanism. On your own machine. Without your knowledge.

”But It’s Just Website Personalization”

I can already hear the apologists: “Calm down Bender, it’s just so Adobe knows to show you the app launcher instead of the signup page.”

No. Stop. This is not okay, and not because of what it does — it’s about what it is.

Your hosts file is a trust boundary. It’s one of the oldest, most fundamental mechanisms for controlling DNS resolution on your machine. Software that silently rewrites it is doing something that security tools have flagged as malicious behavior for decades. Malware writes to your hosts file to redirect traffic. Adware writes to your hosts file to inject tracking. Adobe writes to your hosts file to… redirect traffic and inject tracking.

The fact that Adobe’s reason is “dumb but benign” doesn’t make the technique less alarming. It makes it more alarming, because they burned that technique on detecting a logged-in customer instead of saving it for something that actually required such a grotesque hack.

The Real Question

At what point does commercial software become malware? Because we’ve been slowly boiling the frog here:

• Software that “phones home” without telling you? Normal now.
• Software with background processes that can’t be disabled? Sure.
• Software that modifies system files to enable tracking? Apparently yes, we’re here now.

Adobe’s subscription model means they’ve never had stronger incentive to track your behavior, detect competitors, and squeeze every bit of user-state data they can get. That incentive doesn’t stay in the marketing department. It bleeds into engineering decisions like this one.

The fix is straightforward if you care: open /etc/hosts (or C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows), search for creativecloud.adobe.com, and delete any lines that don’t have a comment above them explaining what they’re for. Then get mad at Adobe for making you do that.

Or, you know, just use Affinity.

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Via thenickdude on Reddit and OSnews