Parallels’ KeyGenie lets you play for a free product key — but you can’t ever win

guest · Aug 26, 2019

Parallels’ KeyGenie lets you play for a free product key — but you can’t ever win
When is a game not a game? When you never win.
August 27, 2019
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/26/parallels-keygenie-product-key-cannot-win/

For 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. Normally, users must buy a product key to run the software beyond its two-week free trial. 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.”

But it turns out it’s an impossibility.
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. He examined the source code of the webpage to see how it worked. He quickly found that no matter what a user does, the code never allows a user to win a free product key.

Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at cyberthreat intelligence firm RiskIQ, looked at the code and found that the robot’s responses were hardcoded.
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The KeyGenie site was born more than five years ago after Parallels found its popular desktop emulation software was regularly falling victim to software piracy.
Parallels built the aptly named “KeyGenie” game so it would rise to the top of search results and replace the illegal keygen search results.
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Parallels’ KeyGenie lets you play for a free product key — but you can’t ever win

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