Hackers Fool Vista into Activating
One of the ways to activate Windows Vista available to Microsoft volume licensing customers is Key Management Service or KMS that requires a centralized server that clients can activate against every 180 days. As such, it's the server that hosts the product keys; and not the client machines.
Thus, with KMS, a company can run a Microsoft-supplied authorization server on its own network, and activate Vista without contacting Microsoft for each copy.
Although KMS is meant to benefit system administrators with many on-site clients, reports are already doing the rounds that some hackers have used a VMWare image and a VBS script to simulate a local KMS that can generate valid Vista product keys.
