Navigation

Language Selection

Search

Exploit Allows Windows XP Piracy

Submitted by srlinuxx on Tuesday 24th of May 2005 03:51:23 AM Filed under

Microsoft

There's a major chink in Microsoft's Windows XP anti-piracy armor, although Windows users are not at risk of security attacks.

A security researcher in India has discovered an uncomplicated and easy-to-exploit weakness in Microsoft Corp.'s WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage), an anti-piracy initiative that checks whether consumer and small-business customers are running legitimately licensed copies of Windows XP.

Debasis Mohanty, a private vulnerability researcher and analyst of malicious programs, published a detailed proof-of-concept demonstration to show how the WGA validation check can be defeated to generate key codes for use on illegal copies of Windows XP.

Mohanty's findings come as the world's largest software maker prepares a mandatory rollout of the program.

Microsoft has been testing the Genuine Advantage program through its Download Center, where users are urged to validate their copies of XP before obtaining certain software updates, patches and fixes.

If users decide against validating, they are still allowed to obtain the requested downloads, but later this summer updates will only be pushed out to valid copies. Security updates will not require validation, even after WGA goes mandatory.

A Microsoft spokesperson on Monday confirmed Mohanty's findings but insisted that the weakness presented no real threat to the company's attempts to strangle software pirates.

The spokesperson said there were no plans to modify the way WGA works, even after Mohanty's public demonstration, which was posted on a high-profile security mailing list.

Full Story.

Login or register to post comments
Printer-friendly version
2164 reads
PDF version

More in Tux Machines

You Can Now Buy the PinePhone Mobian Community Edition Linux Phone

PinePhone Mobian Community Edition is powered by Mobian Linux, which offers a pure Debian GNU/Linux experience on the Linux phone, and uses the Phosh (Phone Shell) user interface by default, which is based on the GNOME Stack and developed by Purism for their privacy-focused Librem 5 Linux smartphone. PinePhone Mobian Community Edition is built from plastic and features the Debian logo on the back. It features a generous 5.95-inch HD IPS capacitive display with 16M colors, 1440×720 pixels resolution, and 18:9 ratio.

Today in Techrights

Shows/Videos: GNU/Linux News, ONLYOFFICE, LibreWolf, and AwesomeWM

KDE Roadmap for 2021, Nvidia now loves Wayland, and Epic Games Store on Linux - Linux News

This time we have the KDE roadmap for the year, Nvidia preparing to better support Wayland and ray tracing on Linux, the death of Flash Player, and an open source epic games store client for Linux.
How to install ONLYOFFICE on Linux Mint 20.1

In this video, we are looking at how to install ONLYOFFICE on Linux Mint 20.1.
LibreWolf Is A Web Browser For Privacy and Freedom

LibreWolf is a fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom. Librewolf strips out all of the telemetry from Firefox and enables a bunch extra security settings out of the box. It has uBlock installed by default and it supports privacy conscious search engines.
AwesomeWM: So Long BSPWM, It's Been Fun

I've been running BSPWM for the past year and it's a great window manager but I wanted a change so I've been convinced to try out AwesomeWM and I'm genuinely impressed, it's very different to what I've become used to but this is a really solid window manager experience.

Linux 5.10.8 Kernel Released - Finally Fixes That Btrfs Performance Regression

Linux 5.10.8 is out today as the latest stable release for the Linux 5.10 LTS series. Making this point release notable is that it finally addresses the 5.10 Btrfs performance regression. As noted back on Christmas, Linux 5.10 was seeing significant slowdowns on Btrfs. For simply unpacking a Linux kernel source .tar.zst file it could easily take multiple times longer on this stable kernel version. While patches for addressing this poor Btrfs behavior on Linux 5.10 were floating around since before the end of the year, it's taken until now to get them tested and queued up for mainline integration. Linux 5.11 meanwhile has a plethora of Btrfs improvements. Also: Better Microsoft Surface Support Is On The Way With Linux 5.12

Latest News

Linux Weekly Roundup: Wine 6.0, Fedora i3 Spin, and More

Here’s this week’s (ending Jan 17, 2021) roundup series, curated for you from the Linux and the open-source world on application updates, new releases, distribution updates, major news, and upcoming highlights. Have a look.

Linux 5.11-rc4

Things continue to look fairly normal for this release: 5.11-rc4 is
solidly average in size, and nothing particularly scary stands out.

In the diff itself, the new ampere modesetting support shows up fairly
clearly - it's one of those hardware enablement things that should be
entirely invisible to people who don't have that hardware, but it does
end up being about a fifth of the whole rc4 patch.

If you ignore that oddity, the rest looks pretty normal, with random
patches all over, and a lot of it being quite small. All the usual
suspects: drivers (gpu, sound, rdma, md, networking..) arch updates
(arm64, risc-v, x86), fiesystems (ext4, nfs, btrfs), core networking,
documentation and tooling. And just random fixes.

The appended shortlog gives the details as usual..

            Linus

Also: Linux 5.11-rc4 Released With NVIDIA RTX 30 Mode-Setting, Haswell GT1 Graphics Restored

Review: CRUX 3.6.1, NuTyX 20.12.0

Coming into the new year I decided I wanted to simplify things a bit and explore a distribution that didn't have as many features and distractions. I decided to kick off my week with CRUX, an independent distribution with a keep it simple (KIS) approach. CRUX runs on x86_64 computers exclusively and the latest version, 3.6, appears to be focused almost entirely on package upgrades rather than new features. CRUX runs the classic SysV init software on top of version 5.4 of the Linux kernel. Shortly after CRUX 3.6 was released the project published a minor update to fix a package issue. According to the documentation it is recommended that people do not attempt to upgrade to CRUX 3.6.1 from an earlier version...

Syndication & Social Media

Follow the site via RSS/Twitter.

Full RSS:

RSS feeds for particular topics are also available

Twitter:

Content (where original) is available under CC-BY-SA, copyrighted by original author/s.

Support Tux Machines

Help Support TM
Wall of Appreciation

Gizmoz

LXer

Linux Journal

Linux Today

System 76

LinuxSecurity.com Advisories

Debian

It's FOSS

OMG! Ubuntu!

GamingOnLinux

Slashdot

DW Latest Releases

DistroWatch

More on Tux Machines: About ● Gallery ● Forum ● Blogs ● Search ● News ● RSS Feed

Part of Bytes Media ● Sister sites below.

FSF

Ubuntu Buzz

LinuxLinks

Content available under CC-BY-SA

Navigation

Language Selection

Search

Tux Machines Section/s

Authors Information

LWN

Active forum topics

Phoronix

OpenSource.com

Insider

Linux.com

Kde Planet

Fedora Magazine