The Latest in IT Security

Free Microsoft Points? Game Over, Man.

08
Feb
2012

There’s an Xbox code generator floating around on Youtube and other sites right now, and a pretty popular one at that. How popular?

This popular:

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20,000+ views so far.

The program promises all sorts of Xbox freebies – 1 month of Xbox Live, 12 months if you’re feeling particularly greedy and 1600 to 4000 free Microsoft points. Of course, everything goes without a hitch in the Youtube video: we see the program boot up, the user selects his target – 1600 MS points – and hits the “Generate Code” button. After a short while, we see a “Hooray, it worked” type message and the person in the video is presented with a code.

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They then cut and paste it into the Microsoft “Redeem points code” website and are given 1600 free Microsoft points because this program is a miracle of coding.

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However.

I’m rather suspicious where programs such as these are concerned, and maybe – just maybe – somebody decided to make a fake Xbox code generator, bought a 1600 Microsoft points code legitimately and redeemed it for their “It works, honest” Youtube video on the basis that they knew they’d nab a whole bunch of people jumping through monetised hoops to claw their money back.

I know, I know. It’s a long shot, but stay with me on this one.

Once the user downloads the file, this is what greets them in the zip:

The program requires the latest version of .Net to be installed, so once the user downloads that and fires up the generator this is what they’ll see:

The program has become “severely overused”, so now you need a password to “stop the leechers”. And how do we do that?

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Well, there’s a surprise – a survey (note that the Youtube video promises “no surveys” in the title). We’ll ignore the fact that the top entry asks “Are you dumb? Find out now” and go take a look at the code while pretending we nabbed the password and continued to the next step.

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“Error, retrying. The packaged file seems to be corrupted or cannot load. Redownload the database? (This will fix the error)” There’s a link. I wonder what it does?

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Oh. Right. Another survey. Does the creator of this program expect you to fill in a survey / sign up to a ringtone service not once but twice? Absolutely.

Is it worth downloading this program, filling in some of those offers and trying it out?

Absolutely not.

Christopher Boyd

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