When I was in college one of my professor introduced us to software cracking although he didn't teach us (just showed us how to make an app registered for free lol). It opened my mind into the brand new world called, cracking. I was really into it I even bought a bunch of tutorial CDs. I learned the history, the basics and the tools. Unfortunately, for whatever reasons it didn't sink into my brain whatever I do haha. Assembly language is just a bit too much for me I think.
But today! I made a milestone LOL. I just cracked my very first software. I'm not bragging, seriously, I just feel alive because for a very long time.. at last! I cracked a software lol. Ok, before you criticize my cracking skillzzz it's not really a super secured software neither a widely used one. But hey it's my first and it's all that matter (well, at least to me :D)
I'm only doing this for personal and educational purposes only. I'm a software a developer and I think it's normal if I can make one, I can break or reverse one too.
Ok, here's how I did it. The app has a 30-day trial period and requires the user to purchase a license key. The checking of license is very simple. It was done by a routine inside a timer. Basically if I turn off the timer the problem is solve since it only relies on the timer and doesn't even check on startup. But just to make it a little bit more "complicated" I made some more changes haha. When calling the license checker, it calls a function requires two parameters the registration id and the key. It calls another function to check if it is valid and return the no. of days it will be valid. But again the succeeding routine is not very hard it will only check if the no. of days is greater than 0 and it will continue as normal. So what I did is fixed the no. of days to 9999 so it will never expire plus it will also be displayed on the about which is what I want lol. And that's it! My simple mind enjoyed it so forgive me haha.
DISCLAIMER: The app was actually can be registered legally since we purchased their hardware but we don't have enough time to wait for the supplier to send us the key since we really need to install it to the client.
NOTE: I can't post the tools I use.. uhm you know.. :D but there's a lot of "FREE" tools out there like Ollydbg, .NET Reflectors, Ildasm to name a few.
