Toolkit

Story: Microsoft pushes antipiracy tool to desktop

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I can see where malicious hackers could find useful ways of exploiting this 'desktop warning' by creating a piece of malware that replaces it for one that impersonates legitimate warnings and does various other things instead of just warning, like searching out users who lack certain security patches. Or for example release a 'patch' against the desktop warning to catch people who don't understand what the hell is going on with all these warnings on their system, and then maul them after coaxing them to download the fake patch.
User Ignorance is now and will be for a long time to come a very fertile playground for malicious opportunities.

Then again, it's also another half-assed attempt from Microsoft to establish their presence and make it known to people they want their profit's worth. They could be working on a more secure environment with for example a Service Pack 3 for Windows XP instead of writing silly programs that check the validity of a source and then spam the user with (mostly) useless warnings.

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