The Vista keygen 'hoax' script causes confusion

 

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By Rene Millman

Posted on 5 Mar 2007 at 15:20

The programmer who wrote a controversial VB script, which was claimed could unearth Windows Vista activation keys, has admitted the script was a hoax. Others, however, claim that the script works perfectly fine.

The developer called 'Computer User', writing in the Keznews Forum, said that the script to find valid license keys for Windows Vista didn't work after all.

'The fact is, brute force keygen is a joke, I never intended for it to work. I have never gotten it to work, everyone should stop using it! Everyone who said they had got a key is probably lying or mistaken,' the author said on the forum.

As reported on our sister site IT PRO, Computer User originally claimed that the program used brute force methods to find valid license keys. The same keys could also be found in legitimate copies of the software, leading to a situation where a valid copy of Vista could potentially fail to properly activate.

Others on the forum claimed the script worked and one posted a video demonstrating its effectiveness.

Microsoft responded to the news with one of its managers posting on his blog criticising efforts to bypass the security mechanism.

'The script written to perform this attack goes through about a thousand keys every half an hour; frankly, that's a pretty slow brute force attack,' said Alex Kochis, senior product manager of Windows Genuine Advantage at Microsoft.

He said that assuming that attack was successful, what would happen if a key that was hit upon was also the same key in use by a legitimate customer? He said that this would boil down to a customer service issue.

'Personally I think it's unlikely that this would happen as our product activation servers perform a more rigorous analysis of the keys that are sent up for activation than the local key logic does,' said Kochis.

'For this reason producing keys that will ultimately activate is less likely than just hitting upon one that will pass the local logic.'

He said that Microsoft would be looking into any reports of legitimate customers being refused product activation on a genuine key and if anyone had experienced this problem the company would like to know.