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Malwarebytes Offers Pirates Its Premium Antimalware Product For Free
An anonymous reader writes: If you have a cracked or pirated version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (MBAM) product the company has debuted an Amnesty program for you. Venturebeat reports: "If you pirated Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, purchased a counterfeit version of the software, or are having problems with your key in general, the company is offering a free replacement key." CEO Marcin Kleczynski explained the program and his statement reads in part: "When I started Malwarebytes, I absolutely had no idea how successful we would be today. I am extremely grateful for all of the support from everyone and how fast we’ve grown. That being said, I picked a very insecure license key algorithm and as such, generating a pirated key was, and is, very simple.
The problem with pirated keys is that they may collide with a legitimate key just by the sheer numbers. For example, Larry may generate a pirated key that matches the exact key that I already bought. Yes, this is silly, and yes, this is literally the first thing a professional software company thinks of when building license key generation, but when you think you’re building a product for just a few people you don’t hash out these details.
Now we’ve grown up, and we’ve got a new licensing system that we’ve rolled out in stages. The only problem is that we have millions of users that we’ve sold keys to, or a reseller has sold keys to, or we’ve given out keys to without keeping track. It is a mess, and you as a consumer have every right to be upset.
The problem with pirated keys is that they may collide with a legitimate key just by the sheer numbers. For example, Larry may generate a pirated key that matches the exact key that I already bought. Yes, this is silly, and yes, this is literally the first thing a professional software company thinks of when building license key generation, but when you think you’re building a product for just a few people you don’t hash out these details.
Now we’ve grown up, and we’ve got a new licensing system that we’ve rolled out in stages. The only problem is that we have millions of users that we’ve sold keys to, or a reseller has sold keys to, or we’ve given out keys to without keeping track. It is a mess, and you as a consumer have every right to be upset.
Burned-in MACs? My nForce 2 motherboard's NIC (the nVidia one, not the Realtek one) has a MAC that's user-definable in BIOS.
CLI = Command Line Interface.
If Dir("gethwi.bat") "" Then Kill "gethwi.bat"
Open "gethwi.bat" For Append As #1
Print #1, "w32tm
Print #1, "systeminfo >gsys.dat"
Print #1, "getmac >gmac.dat"
Print #1, "exit"
Close #1
Shell "gethwi.bat", vbHide
You use this information to generate an ID. But you don't even hash it with a one way hash, which means it's possible to forge a reply to give an desired result. A good one way hash would at least make that impossible. It is also not scaling very well - you will need a lot of support for pissed customers who changed parts of their computer or changed timezone.
Furthermore, you do no authentication of the answer from the server. Anyone can send the response, and be accepted. You do not have any security. It would be trivial either remove your DRM by jumping over it, or supplying the very wrong values. A race condition would also work - overwriting the gsys.dat, gtime.dat, gmac.dat before your program reads it. Or simply replacing the code snippet above with a batch file which state echo "Desired values..." > gsys.dat.
So take an evening, think about how you can bypass your system. Try my suggestions. Fire up an debugger, and have a look at the software.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit