It looks like Microsoft's
unhackable OS activation malware has been hacked. There is
an
active thread at the Keznews forums (registration req.), 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 have not tested it personally but apparently
the
keygen is working fine.
The code is floating, the method is known, and there is nothing MS can do at this point other than suck it down and prepare for the problems this causes. To make matters worse, MS will have to decide if it is worth it to allow people to take back legit keys that have been hijacked, or tell customers to go away, we have your money already, read your license agreement and get bent, we owe you nothing. This is ugly for MS, and if it allows you to take back your legit keys, how long do you think it will take before people catch on to the fact that you can call in and hijack already purchased keys once you generate one that someone else activated? No, this is a mess, and the problem is the very malware activation and anti-consumer licensing that MS built into Vista. Then again, it is kind of hard to feel sorry for them the way they screw their paying customers. We'll give it three days before there is a slick GUI version with all the bells and whistles.