When I was at Malwarebytes we had concerns that IOBit was stealing our database and passing it off on their own. While we had a lot of obvious proof, we felt it wasn't enough for the average person to understand.

To get real proof we created a new program that only existed on a single machine, and then added a signature for that application. This way there could be no claim that they independently added something to their database, as the program was not malware and literally impossible to actually find in the wild. Once they added it to their database we made a blog post and the issue got a lot of attention.

https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/29681-iobit-steals-mal...