Though it’s possible to trick the game into thinking you’ve won, nothing happens - and no key is ever awarded.Ī screencap of the KeyGenie game no product key is ever produced (Image: TechCrunch) “You can trigger the case for getting a key but there is no way to get to it.”
“You have that winning screen but there’s never a product key on the page,” he said. “There’s never any product key,” he told TechCrunch. Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at cyberthreat intelligence firm RiskIQ, looked at the code and found that the robot’s responses were hardcoded. We asked three security researchers to independently verify our findings. “But the source code proves it never will.”
“It’s to get people to sign up for a trial by pretending to give them a chance at a free license,” he said. He quickly found that no matter what a user does, the code never allows a user to win a free product key. He examined the source code of the webpage to see how it worked. Security researcher John Wethington alerted TechCrunch to the KeyGenie game more than a year after he told Parallels that the game was impossible to win.
But if you can make it through five questions without the robot guessing what you’re thinking, the robot says a key “may be yours.” Normally, users must buy a product key to run the software beyond its two-week free trial. When is a game not a game? When you never win.įor years, virtualization software maker Parallels offered the chance to win a free product key if you “stump the KeyGenie,” a virtual robot which users can play against.
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