Steinbring Inc.

Microsoft’s new activation policies call for every single copy of the new operating system to be activated. This includes copies purchased as part of the company’s corporate volume licensing program, and Microsoft tried to make the process less daunting for IT administrators.

The company created something called the “Key Management Service,” which would allow the administrator to activate all the computers in a single swoop. From there, a central computer would maintain all activations for the network.

To prevent piracy, however, the activation is good only for a period of 180 days. After that, the computer would need to reconnect with the KMS to receive another key. This was done to discourage people from attempting to use the KMS to activate their own computers at home.

But it was only a matter of time before hackers figured out how to reproduce a local KMS using a VMware image and a VBS script. From there, as long as the edition of Vista is either Business or Enterprise, the keys generated would successfully activate the operating system.