Neowin.net

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with more than 35 government agencies worldwide, announced an ambitious effort on Tuesday to get ISPs and other organisations to deliver the net from the plague of zombie spam networks. The group is encouraging ISPs to identify and quarantine customers whose PCs may have unwittingly been turned into spam zombies, under the control of hackers.

ISPs are also being encouraged to apply rate-limiting controls for email relays and to block port 25 (a common Internet port used for email) for inappropriate use as part of an educational campaign called Operation Spam Zombies. ISPs are also being urged to educate consumers about net security and to provide tools to disinfect computers under one of the most ambitious net security education initiatives to date.

View: The Register

It is important to note that this issue is not a security vulnerability or a hack that puts customers at any risk, nor is it a vulnerability in the activeX control WGA uses to determine if a customer is running genuine Windows. This is simply an issue of users taking a validation code from a genuine copy of Windows and using it on a non-genuine copy of Windows. The threat is similar to that posed by the illegal distribution of software burned to CDs.

Of course a counterfeiter could use this method to steal software for themselves, but because the code expires quickly, it would be useless to share the code with any other users.

Q: Who would benefit from this practice?
A: This method of counterfeiting is only an option for relatively sophisticated users who are running both a genuine version of Windows (from which they would take the code) and a non-genuine version (to which they would apply it). This method only applies to the Download Center, where customers would need to know exactly what to look for, and not Windows Update or the Automatic Updates feature that most customers use.

Q: How does the code expire?
A: Microsoft “hashes” the PID returned from the validation tool (genuinecheck.exe) with a Microsoft.com timeserver time code that is checked by the page logic on the Download Center, which means the code is only valid for a short period of time.

Q: Does Microsoft have plans to change or improve WGA validation to address this vulnerability?
A: With WGA, Microsoft seeks to balance the need to make downloads easily available for customers, while trying to safeguard our IP from counterfeiters. In striking this balance, Microsoft will defer to the needs of its customers to validate their computers as easily as possible so that they can receive the updates they need to stay secure. Furthermore, because the code generated by the validation tool expires so quickly, we don’t perceive this as an issue significant enough to outweigh our customers’ needs for hassle-free downloads.