The mechanisms spying on Maxthon browser users, discovered by EXATEL Security Operations Center (SOC) are a great example of how much attention has to be paid to the used software. Maxthon basically enjoyed a good reputation and there were very few signs indicating the bad intentions of its creators.
Owing to the information obtained through code reverse engineering analysis, the EXATEL SOC team managed to reach a functionality that the authors of the fairly popular tool tried to embed in the software. In short, the embedded mechanism regularly provided a Chinese server with all that it was able to find about the resources of our computer, including searched phrases or listings of used software.
The browser developers announced that they have removed the malware from its code. We have not yet verified whether this has happened.
The report is definitely worth reading if you want to get a grasp of the wide spectrum of online threats.
