Microsoft's anti-piracy program cracked

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.

Here is the Rediff story. µ