Hackers get around Windows Vista activation – sort of

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 09 December 2006 18:17

Your IT - Entertainment

Ah, the never ending quest of the hackers to defeat anti-piracy measures. Nothing has truly stopped them in the past, with only Microsoft’s Vista activation servers proving the most troublesome. But a sneaky new way has emerged, thanks to Microsoft’s own technology.

With the Business and Enterprise versions of Vista, Microsoft is allowing companies to install a ‘Key Management Service’ (KMS), which contacts a server on a company’s network to locally activate those two versions of Vista.

Microsoft knew that this might happen, so they put in a bit of a failsafe – the activation only lasts for 180 days, thereby stopping users from walking into the office with their computer loaded up with pirate version of Vista Business edition and walking out with a fully activated computer.

Of course they could, in theory, just take that same computer back into the office on the 179th day and re-activate it, but now that the cat is out of the bag and Microsoft clearly knows of this sneaky ‘workaround’ to their anti-piracy measures, the hackers cannot expect Microsoft to sit on their laurels and just take the piracy lying down.

After all, it’s the pirates that Microsoft wants most this time around. Businesses, governments and users who buy a copy of Windows pre-loaded onto a desktop or notebook computer are well known to be buying a legitimate copy of Windows. It’s what has given Microsoft its massive cash reserves after all, along with millions of legitimate sales of different versions of Office.

But with little anti-piracy protection on earlier Windows and Office versions, or ones that were trivial to work around, billions of dollars of legitimate sales were lost into the digital mist of cyberspace.

Microsoft’s advances in activation technology have worked wonders at stopping the ‘casual copying’ that pirates have taken for granted for years. Instead, they’ve had to seek out versions of Microsoft’s software with a ‘Volume License Key’, or essentially business versions that did not need activation, but simply a seemingly valid license key.

Of course, Microsoft knew that this was happening too, and started up the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program to catch Windows pirates and stop them from easily getting security updates or from downloading new programs such as IE7, Windows Defender and others.

So successful is this program still to this day, that Microsoft has finally decided to implement it for Microsoft Office, as we revealed not too long ago on iTWire, with January next year the drop dead date for those with pirate versions of Office wanting to get essential security updates. The program is unsurprisingly titled the ‘Office Genuine Advantage’ (OGA) program.

The battle with the hackers and pirates will long continue, with Microsoft no doubt about to embark on a stricter policy of checking the activation of copies of Vista and Office 2007 now that news of this hacker workaround is very public knowledge.

I just hope it doesn’t inconvenience legitimate users who have paid good money to buy the software. There have been glitches with WGA that have seen legit users accused on screen of perhaps having a non-genuine copy.

If these anti-piracy measures are to be foisted upon us all, as is happening, Microsoft needs to ensure that legitimate users receive an uninterrupted, trouble free experience. After all, that’s the least of the advantages you’d expect from any ‘genuine advantage’ program.