Security threats Toolkit

Story: Microsoft 'frightened' by police XP hack

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Not all unlicensed windows copies are used by people with eye patches

My first reaction is if you are using pirated software than you should expect to be putting yourself at risk -
1) from the source of the pirated software as they could have embedded a nasty in there and
2) because you can't get updates/patches

However, I had a friend that legitimately bought a PC from an independant store (and paid way over the odds for the shoddy hardware they gave her) and the version of windows wasn't valid and so she couldn't do windows updates because of WGA. Within weeks she was riddled with spyware etc. and it ran like a dog. I cleaned it up with free tools as best I could but advised she needs to have windows updates especially service pack 2. I told her to call the store and ask them to sort it out because they shouldn't be distributing pirate copies or unlicensed windows boxes.

She went to the store and they told her she had to pay for a legitimate copy of windows. They sold her Windows XP pro despite windows xp home and vista being available and charged her full RRP. They didn't even offer to install it for her.

In this case the WGA caused untold problems for a novice user who hadn't deliberately used a unlicensed version of windows. However, the real baddies here are the store that sold the dodgy system. If Microsoft had done as Xwindowsjunkie said if they bricked/killed unlicensed versions of windows then it would stop stores putting them out their on unsuspecting novice users. However, this would mean that a lot of illegal users may choose to jump ship to an open source os like linux and Microsoft would much rather they continue to use a pirate copy of xp than increase the linux install base.

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