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WGA — Too Many False Positives

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the customers'-genuine-disadvantage dept.

An anonymous reader writes, "Microsoft insists that its Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy program is nearly flawless. But that's not the impression you get when you visit the company's WGA Validation Problems forum. Ed Bott at ZDNet went through 137 problem reports submitted there during a two-week period, each one accompanied by the output from the official Microsoft diagnostic utility, and found that 42% of the people reporting problems were actually running Genuine software. From the article: 'One large group consists of people who, for some unexplained reason, were displaying cryptographic errors related to digital signatures. The problem is so common, in fact, that Microsoft representatives have a canned response they paste into replies to forum visitors who appear to be showing false positives caused by these errors.' In a related story, the first WGA errors from Windows Vista and Office 2007 have appeared in the wild."

2 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. My Experience with a WGA False Positive by Kelson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in July(?) when Microsoft issued an update to the WGA tool, I figured I may as well install it (I'd be forced to eventually) on my one Windows box. So I installed it, and rebooted, and the login screen proclaimed loudly that Windows was not genuine. (Well, not literally loudly, it didn't shout over the speakers or anything -- which would be an interesting deterrent, now that I think about it.)

    This came as something of a surprise, given that:

    1. This was a Dell, not some no-name computer.
    2. It still had the original OS install, and no hardware had been changed.
    3. The previous version of WGA had reported no problems.

    I logged in, did some searching on Microsoft's knowledge base, and found a link that said something like "Validate here." I clicked on it.

    To my surprise, it told me my copy was perfectly valid.

    I eventually concluded that Norton Internet Security had blocked the initial validation attempt. Because there was no desktop shell, there was no opportunity for it to pop up a notice and ask me if I wanted it to let the data through.

    After that experience, I can't say I'm surprised that Microsoft found many of their false positives to be the result of security software. Admittedly, they were looking at registry changes, crypto problems and McAfee, rather than a transient error with Norton.

  2. The Question Is... by TheGreatHegemon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How many false copies of windows pass as authentic?