The bMighty Blog -- Security

Ooops -- Microsoft Nags More Office Users Than It Meant To

Posted by Keith Ferrell Monday, Apr 21, 2008, 11:12 AM ET

Microsoft's latest attempt to track down illegitimate copies of its programs -- in this case Office -- went a bit (and way more than a bit) farther than the company intended last week when it released an Office piracy detector worldwide, instead of to the four countries the program targeted.

The Office Genuine Advantage program was supposedly aimed only at users in Chile, Turkey, Spain and Italy, and would place nag-notices on machines found to be running illegal copies of Office.

But Microsoft released the code to all the servers in the Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) system, resulting in false identifications of legit copies as fakes.

The inadvertently (Microsoft's word) widecast OGA tracker remained on the WSUS servers for twenty-four hours, according to this Microsoft OGA blog.

Not the first time WSUS has experienced "that went farther than we intended" problem, as this unauthorized WSUS install tale from bMighty last fall shows.

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