When Virtual Appliances Turn to the Dark Side

Before going RTM or GA with Microsoft Vista, Microsoft wanted to overhaul the operating system’s copy protection schema to try and fight back in the OS piracy battle that it has found itself in time and time again.

Unfortunately for the business community, this meant doing away with activation free Volume License Keys which certainly made deploying Microsoft operating system servers in an organization a lot easier for IT staff. Instead to try and curb piracy, Microsoft opted to change this business class licensing to a new program, Volume Activation 2.0 which comes complete with a license key management service (KMS). A KMS server within your organization would then be used to activate all of your Vista clients, that way, the client machines don’t have to keep connecting back to Microsoft. Using KMS, a client machine in an organization would have to keep checking in with the KMS server every 180 days, again, as a form of piracy check.

Oddly enough, the KMS feature wasn’t supposed to be scheduled for release until some time next year. To Microsoft’s dismay, it seems as though those individuals or groups of people who crack or pirate software always seem to be just one step behind in the process. It seems as though they have already figured out a clever way to circumvent the copy protection using this yet to be released feature.

The idea is to use what we in the virtual community have come to adopt as the virtual appliance. By downloading a VMware virtual machine image and then using the free VMware Player to run it, a user can then execute the scripts on that virtual machine to act as a KMS server to offer client machines the activation rights needed from within the local environment rather than having to contact Microsoft directly.

This standalone KMS server called “Windows Vista Local Activation Server – MelindaGates” may very well be the first documented case of a virtual appliance gone bad.