Single Verizon IP Address Used For Hundreds of Windows 7 Activations

An anonymous reader writes with this story from TorrentFreak: A presumed pirate with an unusually large appetite for activating Windows 7 has incurred the wrath of Microsoft. In a lawsuit filed [in] a Washington court, Microsoft said that it logged hundreds of suspicious product activations from a single Verizon IP address and is now seeking damages. ... Who he, she or they are behind address 74.111.202.30 is unknown at this point, but according to Microsoft they're responsible for some serious Windows pirating. "As part of its cyberforensic methods, Microsoft analyzes product key activation data voluntarily provided by users when they activate Microsoft software, including the IP address from which a given product key is activated," the lawsuit reads. The company says that its forensic tools allow the company to analyze billions of activations of software and identify patterns "that make it more likely than not" that an IP address associated with activations is one through which pirated software is being activated.

Comments

From Micro-Soft

[Anonymous Coward]

This great piece of history still rings true today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists#/media/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists.jpg

Many here should read, learn, and abide...

Re:From Micro-Soft

[spire3661]

This would a hell of a lot more true if Bill didnt take all that money and fuck us for 2 solid decades.

Re:From Micro-Soft

[Anonymous Coward]

Its funny when you put that letter in the context of history:
- Bill Gates used Paul Allen to steal computer time from other university staff
- They used that stolen time, paid for by tax payers and donations to the university, to make their commercial software
- Bill Gates received a personal loan from the richest person in Seattle (his father)
- Bill Gates was driving a porche when he started uni - back then Porches were rare as hen's teeth

If anything, that letter just points out how much Gates thought he was entitled to - an entitled sociopath who has made everyone think hes the Mahatma Gandhi of IT.

Re:From Micro-Soft

[i.r.id10t]

- Bill Gates was driving a porche when he started uni - back then Porches were rare as hen's teeth

Nope, not rare. Not expensive either. About 2x what an American car would run. I've got the receipt for the '65 356C coupe my dad bought new in July '65, and his out the door price with an aftermarket AC unit was $3700. A '65 Mustang would've cost him about $2000.

In the later '60s and early 70s there were the "budget" Porsches - the 912 and 914....

Now if he was driving a Carrera2 or one of the 30 901 badged cars (Porsche got sued, changed the model to 911), then yeah, rare.

Re:From Micro-Soft

[dcw3]

For those who've read the link, note that Bill complained that they'd only made the equivalent of $2/hr. Just for reference purposes, minimum wage back then was $2.00 an hour in 1974, $2.10 in 1975, and $2.30 in 1976. Should they have made more?...debatable. This was essentially a start up operation (many never become profitable), and initial product development costs are often written off. In that brave new world, before EULAs, nobody bought untried stuff like this.

Proxy?

[TWX]

Makes me wonder if this is a proxy, a Tor exit node, or some other form of gateway through which hundreds or thousands of PCs get some kind of Internet connection through.

On the other hand, my work has 30,000+ computers that communicate through no more than ten public IP addresses, so if we weren't using a corporate solution for Windows activations then we might pop up in much the same way.

Re: Proxy?

[Runaway1956]

My employer up until sixteen months ago did exactly that. Volume licensing would have saved them some money - not a whole lot of money, but some. But, the IT department was totally incompetent. Now that we've been bought out by a larger company, the IT department is far less incompetent, and we actually have machines that work, OS's that do what they are supposed to do, and something that passes for security. And, volume licensing.

Re:Proxy?

[TWX]

No one thought to sanity-check the huge mirror that Perkin-Elmer designed for the single most expensive and ambitious astronomy project that the world had ever seen, even though two secondary instruments disagreed with the 'correct' measurements that the primary calibration tool reported. Consequently it cost a billion and a half dollars, several years, and required a daring in-orbit repair of components never meant to be space-serviced in order to get the instrument working properly.

In 2003, a NOAA weather satellite being manufactured fell off of its assembly tilting table because no one followed the directions to verify that the table's bolts were installed. The damage cost $135 million to correct.

Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the Martian atmosphere because no one bothered to rectify that one team used fractional units and another team used SI units, so raw data in one unit was assumed to be in another unit, causing the problem that led to being steered incorrectly and hitting the planet.

I never underestimate the ability for people to overlook the most basic things. If massive high-profile projects can be screwed up this easily, then a few people working a relatively unimportant thing like this could easily overlook things.

Re:Proxy?

[PopeRatzo]

since 2001, which was at least 14 years ago.

I hate it when people show off their mad math skills.

Re: Proxy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that we've been bought out by a larger company, the IT department is far less incompetent, and we actually have machines that work, OS's that do what they are supposed to do, and something that passes for security.

OMG, you mean there's a counter example? Every time I've seen a company get bought up the new IT department is less useful than the previous one.

Re: Proxy?

[AK Marc]

When I ordered a Dell through the corporate account, we had a choice to order Windows OEM, or Windows Volume. They'd inform MS of the order, as per our agreement, but we could retire a piece of hardware at the same time, and we'd have our licensed volume OS delivered installed (with our corporate image), at something like a $10 cost. But then, this was a 10,000 person company, with a 4 year refresh, so a few thousand computers a year.

Having the corporate image pre-installed on the PCs was great, and only an option with volume licensing. So there is value somewhere, but not for the 100 seat company, they are almost always better buying with OEM installed.

The real reason MS pushes for no no-OS option is they know so many OEM licenses exist that someone retiring a computer could buy one with no OS, then move the OEM onto it, and at least appear compliant at a glance. Move the sticker or swap the case, not a huge deal for a 100 seat place with 3-person IT, generally 2 help desk to do the grunt work, and one "manager" to hire the consultants to do the real work. The help desk guys sit bored, and can spend all day swapping hardware to avoid a license cost.

Confused

[squiggleslash]

I understand "one key, many IP addresses" as being suggestive of licence violations, but why would "many keys, one IP address" be?

Re:Confused

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

"Microsoft says that the defendant(s) have activated hundreds of copies of Windows 7 using product keys that have been âoestolenâ from the companyâ(TM)s supply chain or have never been issued with a valid license"

It means whomever is there has a legit key generator for windows. Or a computer store who buys stolen keys to keep costs down.

Regardless, I am sure google knows exactly who they are. You aren't really anonymous on the internet. All it would take would be a few curious admins at google or facebook to check their logs for the ip.Hell i bet reddit or someone has already figured out who it is.

Re:Confused

[hey!]

There is no key generator. It's Microsoft own fault if they keys were stolen.

Which does not make using a stolen key legal, any more than a broken window lock in our house makes that fair game for burglars. Nor is using a stolen key ethical (at least in most situations); the principled response to not approving of proprietary software is to use open source software with a license you can live with.

Re:Confused

[AmiMoJo]

Maybe MS has decided to crack down on computer repair stores. I used to work at one many years ago, and an MS rep told us that we mustn't activate Windows ourselves. We had to let the end user do it so that they would be forced to agree to the EULA.

We pointed out that our customers expected a fully working computer that was ready to use when they got it back, but they were not interested. Maybe they want to enforce that rule suddenly.

Re:Confused

[houghi]

Why would Google care who they are? And if you are talking about a search Engine, why not Bing?

Or they could do Linux and do a whois. Or contact RIPE or whomever is in charge of IP distribution.

I did not read that the numbers were stolen, just that they were used. Perhaps it is so high, because it is the only company who does things legally.

Also for Facebook and Google checking their logs, why would they do that? If there is something illegal going on, then what should happen is that they go to the court. The court will then ask for lof the identity of the IP owner, who that must be able to tell who was connected at the specific times.

It is called due process.

small business?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be a small computer business shop that did windows activation on the behalf of their customers?

Voluntary IP address submission?

[waynemcdougall]

IP address is part of the

product key activation data voluntarily provided by users

Ahhh. This must be some strange new usage of voluntarily, of which I was previously unaware.

Re:Voluntary IP address submission?

[alangmead]

You don't need to activate the product over the internet. You can activate over the phone. I haven't looked into it closely, but I'd check if the code the machine generates includes the MAC address. Or if it still includes it if you disable the network driver. Or which MAC address it will use if you add another network adaptor (PCI or USB) which you can throw away as soon as you are done.

Re:Voluntary IP address submission?

[Neil Boekend]

Technically the user voluntarily uses Windows. So any data send by Windows is send voluntarily. Please note that informed consent is not used.

subject

[TFlan91]

Haha, IP Addresses are people now too

Re:Single shop most likely

[TWX]

Last time I installed OEM windows using the correct OEM discs (Windows 7), I was not prompted for registration codes of any kind. I installed multiple computers across two or three models from one manufacturer with the same DVD and on checking what keys were used for activation they were all unique. I don't know if the installer somehow determined a preset key based on a unique identifier associated with the computer itself, or if the OEM sysprep process on the disc determined that the computer was from that manufacturer and generated a somewhat random key based on the legitimacy of the platform, but they all worked fine.

Re:Single shop most likely

[afidel]

I don't know if the installer somehow determined a preset key based on a unique identifier associated with the computer itself
It did, for large volume OEM's Microsoft has them burn the key into the BIOS which is why most don't come with the hologram sticker anymore, there's no need for it on Vista+ systems. The only problem it can sometimes cause is if you're doing a cross version and cross type install without an existing OS on the box (ie it came with 7 home and you're doing an upgrade install of 8.1 Enterprise)

Re:Single shop most likely

[rudy_wayne]

It's either a small shop or an amateur wannabe pirate. Either way, if your computers are hitting Microsoft's activation servers, you're a clueless dope who's doing it wrong. People figured out how to avoid that crap years ago.

Re:Huh?

[rudy_wayne]

Not so mention that hackers cracked the key generating code for Windows 7. Same with MS office. They generate codes and try them until one works, and bingo you've got a legit code.

They've never cracked the key generating code for Windows 7. They just found ways to work around it.

In late 2001/early 2002 somebody figured out the algorithm to generated Volume License keys for Windows XP, and those don't need activation (so that companies with lots of computers don't have to activate 30,000 units). Starting With Windows XP Service Pack 2 Microsoft changed some things so that those generated Volume License keys wouldn't work any more. So you have to find a legit Volume License key somewhere (not all that hard to do).

Starting with Windows Vista, and continuing on to Windows 7, Microsoft changed things again. Microsoft changed the system for Volume License keys, making them not a viable option for pirates. Windows installed on OEM PCs was now using a system that referenced information in the computer's BIOS. Google "System Locked Pre-activation". So people just started flashing their BIOS with the necessary stuff. Windows thinks my homemade PC is a Dell.

Forensic

[Livius]

I'm not sure noticing massive re-occurrences of the same IP address really counts as using 'forensic tools'.

Microsoft has lowered the expectations of the whole of human civilization.

Why wait for hundreds?

[Marginal Coward]

You'd think it would make more sense to simply shut off the "suspicious" activations for a given IP before they got to hundreds. That would seem to be a whole lot faster, easier, and cheaper than filing a lawsuit. (Let's do the math: 200 copies times maybe $100 each = $10,000.)

For comparison, I recently installed a new website using Wordpress, which I'm relatively new to. I got the excellent "Wordfence" security plugin running early-on, which uses a default limit of 20 failed logins within 5 minutes before it bans an IP. My new site evidently got attacked by a botnet (I assume) a few days later because there was a burst of 14 failed logins within the span of a few minutes, each one from a different country. The logins were pretty-much a tour of the ragged edges of the Internet: they came from Russia, India, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Belarus, Vietnam, etc. When all that failed because I had used an obscure admin account name and a strong password - and because Wordfence shut all those IPs down - the botnet evidently gave up.

Though a limit of 20 worked fine, even that seems like more than is necessary to allow normal/legitimate login failures, so I might lower it. I certainly wouldn't raise it to 200. Or file a lawsuit about it.

Re:Why wait for hundreds?

[Marginal Coward]

Correction: $20,000...looks like I can't do math any better than Microsoft...it's late...

Re:Single shop most likely

[gl4ss]

probably they're not doing even oem installs.

the funny thing is.. MS should know if the activations are legit or not. also, if they are unsure, why the fuck are they touting the ip address publicly?

-lassi

At the same time

[justthinkit]

At the same time it is also true that Microsoft is famously tolerant and encouraging of software professionals. Offering software at cost (like offering me Office 2000 for a hundred bucks, way back when), providing dev tools and beta products for free or close to it, and tolerating staggering levels of out-and-out piracy...in the interest of having their products used by a truly large sample size.

If it wasn't for Microsoft, we would still be on mainframes and mini-computers. Paying jacked up prices. For crap, frankly.

The only part of the Microsoft game I don't care for is trying to ship old wine in new bottles (i.e. every version of MSOffice since 2000) and especially the force-marching of us to a worse product (the downward progression away from XP). With XP, Microsoft could have created a decent 64-bit version. They could have given us (essentially) unlimited RAM usage on 64-bit XP. And they could have left it to us to decide when to move on to a product...IFF we thought that product was better. But then they would have had to make a real effort at making future Windows products truly better.

Re:At the same time

[dryeo]

If it wasn't for Microsoft, we would still be on mainframes and mini-computers. Paying jacked up prices. For crap, frankly

Why would you think that? There were lots of decent personal computers in the early '80's, most with operating systems at least as good as MS DOS, including graphical ones like GEM that were better then the early crap that was Windows. Even on the PC there were better versions of DOS then MS DOS which were killed by anti-competitive behaviour.
You are right about MS understanding the benefits of getting programmers and consumers hooked though, encouraging people to copy their software at cost (the price of a floppy usually) but they were very anti-competitive for the longest time and probably did more to hold computing back as any company.

Re:At the same time

[Hognoxious]

I'd look at some other sources if I were you.

Fighters with the guns pointing forward had been the norm since the middle of WW1. One example was the Hawker Hurricane, which was in service before the Spitfire was developed, and which outnumbered the Spitfire by about three to one in 1940. Both were generally considered inferior to the Me 109.

What really made the difference was radar plus Dowding's organisational system. Oh, and home advantage.

Re:At the same time

[Jack Griffin]

Why would you think that?

I think the monoculture MS created in the late 80's to early 00's was a net gain for IT in general because the standardisation of Wintel as a PC platform allowed less nerdy types to get involved and help grow the pie. You can hate on all the bad things MS did, but the fact is having a standard platform during it's infancy was good for IT, just like how the Model T jump started the auto industry. We are now entering a post MS era so can lose the hate, and focus on Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla etc, but the fact remains, any new industry has a critical growth phase, and the likes of MS and Cisco helped make that happen.

Re:At the same time

[Jack Griffin]

What really made the difference was radar plus Dowding's organisational system. Oh, and home advantage.

I've read a little about the war. IMO there were 1000 different things that could've easily changed the result (Chamberlain, Churchill, El Alamein, Tobruk, Enigma, Operation Valkyrie, Manhattan Project, Battle of Britain, Stalingrad... hundreds of others) Attributing something so massive and complex to one or two things seems a little simplistic.

Re:At the same time

[msauve]

So, your logic is that if there weren't a Standard Oil, there would be no gas stations, and we'd still be riding horses.

Re:At the same time

[Grench]

One example was the Hawker Hurricane, which was in service before the Spitfire was developed, and which outnumbered the Spitfire by about three to one in 1940.

Hurricane pilots were responsible for more shoot-downs of German aircraft during the Battle of Britain than Spitfire pilots were.

This is partly due to the Hurricane being available in greater numbers, and partly because the simpler design of the Hurricane meant that the aircraft had a much shorter turn-around time (for rearming and refuelling) than the Spitfire did. The RAF also tended to field the slower Hurricane to shoot down bombers, and used the faster and more agile Spitfires to tackle the bombers' escorts.

Re:At the same time

[tommeke100]

A lot of operating systems of early "affordable" Personal Computers (Apple 2, Commodore 64, ...), mostly running Basic were actually licensed by Microsoft as well. So really, although the industry in general would have come around eventually, it's still Microsoft that understood early on that Software was were it's at. It's actually IBM that fueled the convergence to the PC with their open standards.

Re:At the same time

[morgauxo]

It doesn't matter where they are now. The point is there were alternatives. Without Microsoft one or more of those alternatives would have had Microsoft's user base. Of course.. that would have probably resulted in more money going into that alternative.. which would have meant more development.. taking it to a further level than it was originally developed.

So.. no, we would not all be on mainframes without Microsoft.

Re:At the same time

[operagost]

So the Hurricane was the Y-Wing, and the Spitfire was the X-Wing?

Re:At the same time

[tippen]

IBM did not one but several REALLY fucking stupid things, 1.- When Intel refused to license the 386 for second sourcing IBM refused to buy it, instead sticking with the 286 (which they made) damned near until the Pentium was released.

Interesting version of history you have there... The 386 went into full production in mid-1986. IBM released their first 386-based computer in 1987 (PS/2 Model 80). The Pentium came out in 1993.

Re:At the same time

[Will.Woodhull]

You have that backwards.

The OS/2 development effort funded Microsoft Windows development through contracts prior to Win3.0. If IBM corporate headquarters had pulled its head out of its ass and stopped the infighting between the PC division and the big iron divisions, Microsoft would still be a pipsqueak minor player. But Gates took advantage of IBM's management infighting, wriggled free of earlier contract clauses like a toddler escaping from the constraining hug of its nanny, tweaked what was basically an in-house interface model for the OS/2 prototype into a "cooperative multitasker" running on top of 16 bit DOS (no true pre-emptive multitasking possible), and birthed the Win3.0 monstrosity. The rest of the story, up to WinNT, was Gates' expertise as a marketeer and hypester extraodinaire.

It did not help at all that IBM was relying on Intel to make the 80286 chip truly capable of multitasking. That again was a fault of IBM management, who were not listening to its own engineers since they were management, in talks with Intel management, and thus they knew better.

Gates was right on when he described the 80286 as "brain dead", but that came later.

Re:At the same time

[TheTrueScotsman]

When Intel refused to license the 386 for second sourcing IBM refused to buy it, instead sticking with the 286 (which they made) damned near until the Pentium was released.

I developed on OS/2 in the late 80s. I used various IBM PS/2 machines, including Model 80 (Intel 386DX) and Model 55 (Intel 386SX).

So it can't quite be true that IBM refused to buy the 386.

Re:At the same time

[Will.Woodhull]

This is one of the few Gates myths with some truth behind it. He published GW-BASIC ("GW" for "gee whizz") some time in the 1980s. It was a major breakthrough: an interpreted language that could be used to develop and run custom applications on the small-office-home-office computers of the day, but which had several features of compiled languages. It was brilliant. It is still brilliant, its just that these days Javascript, PHP, Perl, and the like do what used to be done in BASIC, and much more.

The world would be a lot different if Gates had continued to focus on software development, instead of turning away from that to become last century's greatest marketeer and hypester.

Re:At the same time

[JWSmythe]

Yup, if it wasn't Microsoft, all kinds of other companies could have dominated the desktop market. IBM (OS/2), Quarterdeck (DESQview/X), Apple (Mac OS), NeXT (NeXT), any number of *nix companies (X11), and others.

Microsoft got big because they got the consumers interested, and questionable deals with vendors.

Plenty of people only know the tunnel-vision version of computer history and they believe Microsoft is it. They either don't remember (or are too young to have seen) software boxes (ahh, the good ol' days) had logos to indicate which OS they worked on so you could pick the right one.

Re:At the same time

[Hamsterdan]

"The Commodore, like the Apple ][, was a 6502 machine. Neither of these had anything to do with Microsoft, which was only working with the 8080 instruction set. "

Wrong on both counts. Commodore's BASIC interpreter was written by Microsoft. Apple's Applesoft was also written by Microsoft (albeit much slower than Integer BASIC).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Integer BASIC is the one Woz wrote (by himself)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

How else do you get Windows to boot?

[OrangeTide]

If you can't reinstall it 100's of times until it starts working, what else are you supposed to do? Pay Microsoft for support, that smells like anti-trust to me.

What about a small shop ?

[aepervius]

A small shop installing *legal* windows 7 onto PCs would be a normal explanation and would be a single IP with many activation. How the heck do they come to "one IP+many key==pirate" ? A pirate would activate only 1 key. In fact it would be more like 1 key+many IP.

Re:Single shop most likely

[arth1]

It's likely a dynamic IP

% nslookup -type=PTR 20.202.111.74.in-addr.arpa. ::
Server: ::
Address: ::#53

Non-authoritative answer:
20.202.111.74.in-addr.arpa name = static-74-111-202-20.lsanca.fios.verizon.net.

Re:Single shop most likely

[wolrahnaes]

The only problem it can sometimes cause is if you're doing a cross version and cross type install without an existing OS on the box (ie it came with 7 home and you're doing an upgrade install of 8.1 Enterprise)

And let me tell you, trying to install 8.1 Pro on a Lenovo that shipped with regular edition 8 is a test of patience. The installer *really* wants to read that key and is not easily convinced to ignore it and let you enter the key that you actually want.

Re:Single shop most likely

[richy freeway]

It's very very easy to do. Just use the "evaluation" serial (actually provided by Microsoft), which for Pro is XHQ8N-C3MCJ-RQXB6-WCHYG-C9WKB

Then using PKeyui, extract the correct serial from the BIOS/UEFI and activate with that.

Re:Single shop most likely

[afidel]

He's probably talking about a fresh install, not an upgrade. During the first stage GUI installer it won't even ask you if it detects a SLIC key, there are ways around it but it's basically doing the hokey pokey blindfolded for all the advanced user friendliness it provides (ie we know better than you mere mortal)

The 1st version of Windows was a toy,

[Futurepower(R)]

"GEM ... was pig awful, but better then Windows at the time."

GEM worked. It ran Ventura Publisher. I had investigated previous typesetting platforms; they cost $1.4 million.

The 1st version of Windows was just a toy, a dishonest suggestion that Microsoft should get respect, in my opinion. The second version of Windows had problems with fonts.

Far later, Windows 98 had an unstable file system.

MIcrosoft makes more money if its products have flaws.

Re:The 1st version of Windows was a toy,

[tibit]

Can confirm. Used Ventura Publisher a lot back in the day. IIRC, it took a day to pre-render a full set of outline fonts, and you had to have an empty hard drive for it... It worked great, though! I also vividly remember running Ami Pro with its bundled Windows 2, and then Win 2 Corel on Win 3.0 :)