One of Vista’s greatest selling points is ironically the fact that software pirates may actually have to buy it. Microsoft is trying to catch every last hack, exploit, workaround, and any other method used to illegally deploy copies of Windows Vista. On Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage Blog, the efforts against Vista and XP activation vulnerabilities are chronicled, giving well-informed consumers and hackers an inside look into their war on piracy. Recently, blog writer and Microsoft Senior Product Manager Alex Kochis posted an article regarding the Original Equipment Manufacturer motherboard BIOS workaround, and what Microsoft was planning to do regarding the activation security flaw.

But, what exactly is OEM Activation? Basically, it is an agreement between Microsoft and motherboard manufacturers, originally created for Windows XP, to put a marker inside the BIOS of the motherboard that designates that it will have a copy of Windows XP pre-installed on it’s system. Hackers quickly found a way to thwart XP’s protection, named OEM Activation 1.0, since BIOS editors made injecting the marker rather simple.

Of course, Windows XP was easier to get into than Paris Hilton’s … purse. Pirates discovered several simpler methods to illegally use Windows XP, making the actual implementation of OEM Activation 1.0 nearly worthless. With Vista came new techniques from Microsoft, forcing exploiters to be more creative. Likewise, Microsoft got more creative as well, adding new features in its BIOS protection and updating Vista motherboards with OEM Activation 2.0. Naturally, stubborn computer fanatics have once again found flaws in the new protection, but Microsoft has remained calm and composed.

Kochis sheds some light on the software giant’s understanding of the exploit:

There appear to be two primary variants of OA 2.0 hacks circulating. One is similar to the XP approach I described above where actual editing of the BIOS on the motherboard is done to make the motherboard appear to be from an OEM. It is a pretty labor-intensive process and quite risky. If you mess up editing the BIOS of any motherboard, you can quite easily render it permanently useless. So while this method works today, it’s potentially hazardous and really doesn’t scale well to large numbers of systems, which makes it less of a threat.

The second variant does not change anything in the BIOS itself, but uses a software-based approach to fool the OS into thinking it’s running on OA 2.0-enabled hardware. And while this method is easier to implement for the end user, it’s also easier to detect and respond to than a method that involves directly modifying the BIOS of the motherboard.

Since the mass-machine reproduction of the first method would be pretty difficult, mainly due to the possibility of broken hardware and various BIOS factors, Microsoft would rather focus on more wide-spread activation exploits. Stressing customer satisfaction over anything else, Microsoft does ensure that it would put in full effort to counteract this workaround if too many of their customers got scammed by sellers of illegitimate OEM Vista machines.