Microsoft Responds to WGA Circumvention

Yersterday we posted about a bypass that was dicovered to defeat Windows Genuine Advantage Check and asked Microsoft to respond to these findings.

Below is an email response I received from Jed Rose, an expert community leader at Microsoft.

As software pirates have become increasingly sophisticated, Microsoft has sought to keep a step ahead of them by introducing more advanced solutions, such as WGA. With WGA, Microsoft seeks to balance the needs of easily providing its customers the updates they need while differentiating the value of genuine Windows software from counterfeit software. We expected that counterfeiters would try a number of methods to circumvent the safeguards provided by WGA, so this isn't a surprise. But to be clear this attempt represents very little threat to Microsoft or its customers because the code generated by the validation tool expires quickly, so it would be very difficult to share. Continued in Read more