So my friend installed Microsoft Office 2019 on her laptop after downloading it from the internet. When I asked if she downloaded it from Microsoft, she could not remember. Her question was whether she has installed a genuine copy or a corrupt or malicious copy of Microsoft Office? She paid for the license key and wanted to make sure that the installation is from an untouched genuine ISO image of Microsoft Office 2019.
It is not so hard to find out whether an ISO image containing Microsoft Office is genuine or not. All you have to do is find the hash checksum for the downloaded ISO file and compare it with the known genuine ISO image hashes. We can use a tool like File Checksum Tool to calculate the file hashes for the downloaded ISO files and compare the calculated hashes with the list of known file hashes associated with the genuine Microsoft Office ISO images.
But this is where it becomes difficult because it is not easy to find a list of all the known file hashes for various ISO images. And even if there exists such a list, Microsoft keeps releasing new ISO images every now and then – making it very very difficult for an ordinary user to keep track of all the ISO images and their respective file hashes.
Fortunately there is another tool called Windows and Office Genuine ISO Verifier which comes with a list of all the known ISO images and their hashes of many kinds. In this program, you have to select the ISO image file and it will do the rest. You have to click on the Verify button.
It will calculate SHA-1 or SHA-256 hash for the ISO image file and then compare the calculated value with the values in the list. It shows a big red NOT GENUINE if there is a mismatch and a green GENUINE if the hash values match exactly.
You can download the tool for verifying Microsoft Office ISO images from https://genuine-iso-verifier.weebly.com/.