Brute force attack on Windows Vista product keys?

posted by  kevyn (54)  12 months ago (blogs.msdn.com)

This morning as I was checking my feeds while standing in line waiting for coffee I saw a few headlines about a reported brute force attack on product keys for Windows Vista. The attack randomly searches for legit keys.  This is called a brute force attack because there really isn't much intelligence involved and the goal is to just randomly cycle through key after key after key until a legit one is found. One report  indicates that the script written to perform this attack goes through about a thousand keys every half an hour; frankly, that's a pretty slow brute force attack.