The Windows Vista KeyGen - defined as a brute force attack on the operating system - has had its five minutes of fame over the past week. But over the weekend, KeyGen has slipped out of sight and out of mind. It certainly slipped out of the headlines and the news. Alex Kochis, a senior licensing manager at WGA team wrote an obituary for the Windows Vista KeyGen. KeyGen was buried by none other than its creator. The author claimed that the Windows Vista key generator was a hoax and that it was not functional in the least.

"It's nice that the originator has come forward and is encouraging everyone to buy and use genuine copies of Windows Vista. As you can imagine we receive reports of hacks every week. Many turn out to be ineffective, but to determine that we review and investigate every report. One of the first questions we ask ourselves with each reported hack is 'does this represent a real risk to our customers?'" Kochis said.

Cracks for Windows Vista are nothing new, and simultaneously, crack reports to Microsoft are also an every-day occurrence. In this regard, Kochis explained that this is not the first time that a reported hack turns out to be useless.

The Redmond Company also focuses on the commercial dimension of a crack. Outside of all the fully functional hacks that can be implemented, Microsoft will pay special attention to those that are scalable. "It's possible for a hack to be scaled and used by organized rings of counterfeit software traffickers to profit by exploiting innocent victims. Our priority is in evaluating against scalability and risk to our customers and working to help customers that might have been victimized," Kochis added.