Windows Genuine Advantage - Circumvention

Circumvention

In September 2005, Microsoft filed lawsuits against a number of companies that sold unauthorized copies of software based on information from users who were told they have copyright infringing software by the Windows Genuine Advantage application.

On November 16, 2005, Microsoft released a standard Netscape WGA plug-in to complete the Windows validation process from Mozilla Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers (including Netscape) - although it does not use the Firefox extensions system, and thus is not supported by the latest version of the browser. It does not work in other NPAPI browsers such as Opera. Another workaround was released on December 25, 2005 to bypass WGA authentication by using a valid hash generated by a remote system. Microsoft responded with a cease and desist letter to the website host, and the workaround was taken down on January 6, 2006. Many people continue to validate on the Microsoft website from a public computer using a genuine copy of Windows, then write down the hash and continue to use it at home or work. As of July 2006, Microsoft had not prevented people from disabling WGA in this manner. On May 4, 2006 Microsoft announced lawsuits for allegedly distributing unauthorized copies of Windows against eDirectSoftware of Montana, and Chicago-area resellers Nathan Ballog and Easy Computers.

Various workarounds to get past WGA authentication have been released on the Internet. Before Microsoft issued official instructions on removing the WGA Notifier (a desktop application which resides in the notification area and periodically displays messages, reminding users to authenticate their operating system), users simply had to manually remove 2 files in order to get rid of the software from their system (four files: one executable and one dynamic link library in C:\Windows\system32\ and their exact copies in C:\Windows\system32\dllcache\; only an administrator can rename/delete these files) or use specific removal utilities.

In September 2006, Microsoft dropped various required validations on programs such as ActiveSync.

In June 2007 it was found to be possible to validate with WGA when running Linux (see below). The WGA Validation Tool has undergone a number of version changes since then, so this may well no longer be true.