[NEWS] Parallels’ KeyGenie lets you play for a free product key — but you can’t ever win – Loganspace

When is a sport now not a sport? Whenever you by no formula interact.

For years, virtualization map maker Parallels supplied the prospect to hang interaction a free product key in the event you “stump the KeyGenie,” a digital robot which customers can play towards. Most incessantly, customers must take a product key to bustle the map previous its two-week free trial. But in the event you’re going to be ready to wreck it thru 5 questions without the robot guessing what you’re thinking, the robot says a key “will be yours.”

But it completely looks it’s an impossibility.

Security researcherJohn Wethingtonalerted TechCrunch to the KeyGenie sport better than a twelve months after he informed Parallels that the sport became very now not going to hang interaction. He examined the source code of the webpage to test the procedure it worked. He like a flash chanced on that it be now not relevant what a user does, the code by no formula enables a user to hang interaction a free product key.

“It’s to get of us to test in for a trial by pretending to give them an replace at a free license,” he talked about. “However the source code proves it by no formula will.”

We asked three security researchers to independently test our findings.

Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at cyberthreat intelligence firm RiskIQ, checked out the code and chanced on that the robot’s responses had been hardcoded.

“There’s by no formula any product key,” he informed TechCrunch. “You hang that a hit display veil but there’s by no formula a product key on the page,” he talked about. “You could most certainly be ready to space off the case for getting a key but there’s no solution to get to it.”

Though it’s probably to trick the sport into thinking you’ve gained, nothing happens — and no secret’s ever awarded.

“It’s a bunch of hardcoded if-else statements that goal purchase you to the same widget in the pause,” talked aboutEdwin Foudil, a security researcher who moreover performed a cursory evaluation of the dwelling. AndBaptiste Robert, who’s known for locating security vulnerabilities in apps and web sites, talked about his possess tests recount nothing is ever pulled from the server after the user wins, suggesting the winner is by no formula served a product key.

“It looks to be a spurious sport,” talked about Robert.

We contacted Parallels ahead of e-newsletter but spokesperson John Uppendahl failed to comment. If that adjustments, we’ll update.

The KeyGenie dwelling became born better than 5 years ago after Parallels chanced on its standard desktop emulation map became on a usual foundation falling victim to map piracy. Hackers would crack the map’s product key algorithm, then create and share their product key generators — is known as keygens — on file-sharing web sites. Fleet, these keygens floated to the high of search engines and yahoo, making user piracy even much less difficult.

Parallels constructed the aptly named “KeyGenie” sport so it could perchance most certainly most certainly upward push to the high of search outcomes and replace the unlawful keygen search outcomes.

One amongst Parallels’ marketing agencies at the timepublished a blog postclaiming that KeyGenie “will in fact hand out keys,” and that the sport became “programmed randomly.” The post, published seven months later, “generated dozens of trials” and “four-figures in income.”

The Federal Alternate Price, which regulates most certainly spurious selling and marketing, failed to comment outside replace hours.