Windows Genuine Cracked??

[jinxy]

I guess it was only a matter of time.

From: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24134

Microsoft’s anti-piracy program cracked

Indian breaks the unbreakable

By Nick Farrell: Thursday 23 June 2005, 07:16
A BANGALORE programmer has managed to break Microsoft’s anti-counterfeiting system called Windows Genuine Advantage.

Vole has always touted the WGA as unhackable, in the same way that the White Star Line considered its famous tub, the Titanic, to be unsinkable.

According to rediff.com, Debasis Mohanty managed to cracked WGA through an "easy-to-exploit" weakness in the software. So no surprises there then.

Mohanty posted a proof-of-concept programme on Vole's security mailing list.

It shows how the WGA validation check can be tricked to generate key codes on illegal copies of the software. The trick is to use a secondary Microsoft validation tool called 'genuinecheck.Exe'.

Vole has confirmed that Mohanty has managed to crack the WGA, but claimed the hack represented very little threat. So that is all right then.

[jockey0109]

Well that had to happen.

Now as far as I see the response of WGA team towards Vista security, they say that the OEM hack performed on Vista(s) is recognisable by MS. They say that the Hack which is based on the BIOS signatures which the Vista OS would use to see if the installation is on an OEM machine, can be done by changing the code in the BIOS or by changing the software.

Since changing the BIOS is more sophisticated, complex, risky and cannot be deployed on a large scale, the software is changed to achieve the results and it can be very well recognized by MS. Counterfeiters will be charged if and when caught for this.

Hope that this goes towards where they point.