Vista Activation Cracked By Brute Force

[F1]

IT LOOKS LIKE Microsoft's unhackable OS activation malware has been hacked.

There is an active thread at the Keznews forums (account needed), and a summary on its main page about the crack.

It is a simple brute force attack, dumb as a rock that just tries keys. If it gets one, you manually have to check it and try activation. Is is ugly, takes hours, is far from point and click, but it is said to work. I don't have any Vista installs because of the anti-user licensing so I have not tested it personally.

The method of attack has got to be quite troubling for MS on many grounds. The crack is a glorified guesser, and with the speed of modern PCs and the number of outstanding keys, the 25-digit serials are within range. The biggest problem for MS? If this gets widespread, and I hope it will, people will start activating legit keys that are owned by other people....

The Inquirer

[Gizmokid2005]

Sad, but not surprising...I wonder how they are going to deal with it...

[Noob334]

Thats actually kinda of funny that it is already being hacked and so easily as well. maybe it means that vista will become real cheap and we can all afford to upgrade??? I know its wishful thinking but im a poor college student

[TurcoLoco]

Out of curiosity I have done this with XP as well, brute force as time consuming as it might be (but by certain mods such as limiting the search logic to try alpha-numeric characters only, etc.) does work eventually!


There are ways to kill BF or at least shy people away from using it. A few of these technics are already being utilized by some other software.

Being a neutral on topic, I will not disclose any details either situation....I'll let M$ worry about it.