The incident took by surprise thousands of users.
Microsoft launched in the recent days two software updates that, according to the reports of security network experts, would have made useless some windows 7 computers by error.
The incident presented after the implementation of the security update last 9th January, identified as a Microsoft Monthly Rollup Update KB4480970, launched in april 2018.
The two recent updates introduced new security meassures against the known vulnerabilities Spectre and Meltdown; it was corrected an isolation session error that afected the final remoted points of Powershell, besides correcting other Windows errors. The update corrected the activation and validation components in Windows Activating Technologies, which helps the users to confirm that an original Windows 7 version is being executed in their computers.
According to the network security experts, through a post in Reddit an suer posted: “This morning we saw the news about some thousands of computers with Windows 7 were reporting errors. After investigating the incident, we found out that KB971033 had been installed in these machines. Until now, having this KB installed hadn’t been a problem, it looks like achange in the way that activation servers of Microsoft reply to a standard key from the key administration service that are sent can be the resposible of this error.
This key administration service (KSM) allow the users to automatically activate the licence for volume of Windows and Office. Both updates from Microsoft the 8th January male also reference to a unexpected error in a sub section called “Known problems in this updated”.
“After installing the update, some users inform about the activation error of illegal KSM 0xc004f200 in devices with Windows 7”, reported the network security experts. By the other hands, Microsoft stated through an announcement: “We are aware about this incident and we are investigating at this moment. We will provide an update when it is avaiable”.
Though Reddit, some users commented that it was possible to solve this problem deleting the update, deleting the KMS cache and activation data in the Pcs.