nulled versions are usually "provided" by lucious real owners (licensed) that wants to help their friends to have a free version of a paid script like vB. they are usually found in P2P networks, anonymous ftps, and private clubs... (and we even find licensed versions flooding the networks lately!)

you can easily find nulled/nullified versions of any kind of php/cgi etc scripts on gnutella - just do a search with your prefered p2p client, you will have some surprises how people are malicious.. ;?) you can even find versions of vBulletin that were never released... let's say vB 4.1 was found last month... even 4.0 was never put on a table, so this was forcefully a virus or something...

and even big corporations have tried lately to flood these p2p networks... Microsoft is well known to have provided parts of the Windows NT sourcecode some years back... just to give them a peak on the market...

and usually, nullified (named to be a null version because all securities are broken) and nulled versions are distributed anonymously, but lately, we found that some vB coders distributed some enhanced versions of the script... this is widely seen, phpBB and IPB had the same problems in the last years.

these nullified version always have their license verification process broken, that's the main point of these activities usually... the harder the code is to break, the more we see them on the market... challenge for the hackers.

spywares, backdoors, java verifs, encoded or not, these kids always play the game to break these systems that were built just to go against their own actions... no nullifiers, no need to spyfix!