General Cracking Tutorial by _CbD_ Well as many people have asked me for help I am compiling all these question and tring to answer them here, so if you have question that I don't explain please feel free to ask me if you see me and I will do my best to help you.... Q) Where do I start when Cracking a VB program ? A) Well first I strongly recommend getting a tutorial on VB programs, I have wrote 2 on the subject and razzia(Real Kewl guy) has wrote a few. but if you just cant seem to do this I will tell you the basics. First you will not be able to use the BP's (Break Points) that you use with non VB apps as they wont work ie.( Getdlgitemtexta or Getwindowtexta) you will have to use Hmemcpy. Dont set the BP until you have entered the info that you need such as name and serail # or you will break on every single letter or number, Also when you use this you will land in the Kerenel and will have to press F11 to get back to the section of the VB.dll that called Hmemcpy. then do some single stepping and a lot of register checking to see what you program is doing with the data you used. Also use W32Dasm on your vb program to see what calls it makes to the vb.dll such as RegQueryValue(for checking a registry value) and so on. and oh yeah Good Luck........ Q) How do i use SoftIce? A) Read the Docs or Wait till our SI tut's are out :-) Q) SoftIce messed my Video Up what can i do ? A) try setting the proper Video Card in the Setup of SI. if your card is not listed get the Driver Updates. (reset the video card to standard vga and 16 color mode while use SI) -pcdoc2000 Q) How do I use the Loader in Si? A) I dont use it, anyone want to answer this question... :-( Q) The prrgram I am tring to crack has expired and wont let me enter a number anymore what do I do A) Well look in the system registry under Currnet_User & Local_Machine and see if there are any entries for for the program you are useing and delete them then reinstall (Make sure you delete all files that were installed the first time... also use a registry logger such as cleansweep to monitor the files that your program puts on the drive... (another method is to make a new startup disk, or update your existing one before installing the program. Label it with date and something like... before Word2000 install (sustituting your program name for Word2000,then boot to the floppy and at the type sys c: at the command promt (a:\). This will replace user. dat and system.dat (the registry) with the version you had before, but any other programs and files you added will be gone because the registry is also the table of contents for everything on the system)-pcdoc2000 Q) I just cracked this program, or I thought I did. It said thank you for registering and was the registered version while i was using it, but when i restart it it still says unregistered, How can i fix it.... A) Well what you did was most likely change a jmp here and there and make the program take you invalid code as a real one but the program wrote your code to the registry or a ini file then when you restarted it , the program read the number or key and it was a invalid one, so you must find where the program looks for a registry entry (RegQueryValueEx(A) or a GetPrivateProfile(A)) and force the program to validate any key that it sees. This can be a very difficult process so be prepared for a lot of hell on this one. but the best idea is to use W32dasm to disasemble the taget then look in the import functions to find the fuctions above, then trace each one of them ( will be many) then after you trace the code and find the right one it will most likely be a matter of changing a jnz to a jz or somthing simple like that if you still cant do it seek help from a wise cracker (NOT a SMART ASS though) Wise as in smart :-) Q) What is a good staring place for Fuction Disabled Protections? A) Well MessageBox(A) or Dialogbox(A) is a very good starting place as these are most often used to call the little box you see when you try to use a fuction that is disable ie. (Nope cant do it it is a demo version) or in W32dasm look in the String Reference's for something like Fuction Not Availible in Demo or Command not Availible or even Can Not Save in Shareware Demo these are good pointers to the calls that you want to bypass. for more info on this get my tutorial on WinScan (Fuction Disabled Protections) .. Q) What is the best programs to crack? (easy) A) Well they are generaly programs by (a) single programers or (b) very large corparations or even (c) Specailty software reasons below (a) He cant afford to buy the registration routines that would make it hard for us to crack so he uses hardcoded Numbers in the protection (b) They have so damn many programmers and most are so stupid they use simple protections thinking that hmm nobody will crack our software we are MicroSoft ;-) (c) They use Fuction Disabled protections cause they are lazy and dont want to write 2 differnt versions of thier super specail program Q)How long does it take to crack a program ? A) hmm 10 min, 1hour, 1day, 1 week, 1month, hmm forever .... Depends on the protection Q) What is Softice? A) A debugging system Q) What is debugging A) Go bother someone else i dont have time for you :-| Q) What is W32dasm? A) a windows disasembler that will give you the assembly language code of a program. Q) What is Assemly Language? A) Goto #asm on any IRC network and ask them ;-) ( it is the machine level code that your computer uses to carry out instructions from a program. Q) I want to learn Cracking How can I do it (first put the crack pipe down...:-)-pcdoc2000 A) well it is not like you can just learn to crack you have to read read read read and yet read more then you will need to learn assembly and then get the right tools for the job (Softice, W32dasm, a Hexeditor and a few other advanced tools) it is like sex anyone can do it but only a few of us will ever master it and satisfy all parties involed :-) Q) Who is +ORC ? A) Well lets see a fairly good cracker that has ben doing it for awhile(so he says) and has lots of info on the subject, He does however have a very piss poor attitude if you ask me and most think he is a god but I think he is like any other cracker who has wrote a few good tut's and give a few good lessons.. DONT IDEALIZE HIM he is only human...... Well that will do it for now, hope it helps, and if it don't then oh welI. tried so till next time Happy Cracking _CbD_ MexElite'97 ME/C4N'97 #Cracking4Newbies on EFNET Come see us...........