Vista has been leaked in every conceivable form and in all its various releases and flavours, but has still remained difficult to crack for the average swashbuckling black-beard. Various timer programs forcing the activation to hold off indefinitely and other cracks haven't come close to the efficiency of the recent OEM BIOS emulation tool-kit that has floated about - but which is significantly more difficult to use that a 'normal' crack or serial. But the NoPE release has a major key difference to other previous pirated copies of Vista - it is completely cracked, the product appears activated, updates work, and no key needs to be entered, straight from the installation media without any effort on the part of the pirate. I presume that the hackers have managed to replace the Vista image on the DVD, with the pre-cracked version. Microsoft moved to an image-based install with Microsoft Vista, as opposed to the usual convoluted set up process. Some my friends confirmed me that it working perfectly :-)

In Vista related news, Robert Paveza, a senior Web application developer with Web-based marketing company Terralever, has uncovered a two-step process for exploiting Windows Vista's User Account Control. In his published paper, Paveza said that the vulnerability uses a two-part attack vector against a default Vista installation. The first step requires that a proxy infection tool be downloaded and run without elevation. That software can behave as the victim expects it to while it sets up a second malicious payload in the background.