Maybe I went overboard, but I went through every Adobe exe that was installed and setup firewall rules blocking them. I notice that some of the ‘sattelite’ programs they claim are required for proper running remain in task manager after the main program is closed.

Not just out of caution for Adobe meddling, but also… there’s no such thing as a free lunch, my assumption is that the ‘free’ pirated software cracked by a ‘friendly’ Russian will be doing something nefarious… and it probably won’t be as obvious as coming from eg After Effects.exe