Cracking an Application Method One (PART 1)

Cracking an Application Method One

Well For this Security Article I will use A ‘Crack Me’ Application, as I don’t want to use any software that is shareware as that IS ILLEGAL. And as this forum is full of programmers I don’t want someone to tell me, “Hey you are cracking my program!”. I don’t do such stuff! Try these methods of cracking on ‘Crack Me’ Applications. This will help you to know how cracking is done, how simple it is to crack, and how simple you can loose money because you have your cracked application running on the Internet. So knowing all this, it may help you to prevent such cracking.

This is only one method, and this is just the simplest and the most basic form of cracking. This will NOT work on all applications, as some of the applications are more secure and can’t be cracked with this method, but of course NEVER secure enough to be 100% uncrackable!

So let the fun start, first Of all You will need an application called W32Dasm, and another software named ‘Hackers View’ or even known as HIEW. You can find them attached.

After downloading these two programs extract them to a folder where you want, now fire up W32Dasm and go to ‘Disassembler / Open File to Disassemble

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Now browse to the file you want to crack and open it, if it does not open then copy your file to the desktop and open it with W32Dasm from there, it should open. After that give it some time to open it completely. Now open your application in our case it is this one:

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And we are going to crack where it says ‘What word am I thinking of?’ Now try inputting something where you want to crack and press ok, It should tell you that it is wrong, now either write down that phrase or remember it. Make sure you do!
In this case it errors out this message:

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So now we go to W32Dasm and go to Search / Find Text

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And write down a part of that phrase, in this case I wrote only ‘Sorry, not’ and press ‘Find Next’

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It should take you to the place where there is that phrase:

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Now scroll up a little bit and you should see something like:

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So this means that this message is displayed from the address 0043B04D. So Scroll up even more until you find that address:

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So now we know that this is a jne, meaning ‘Jump If Not Equal’ so this is self explanatory, if we enter wrong text and it is not equal to the text then as it is not equal it will jump to that message box. So we have to edit that from jne to je ‘Jump if Equal’

Now at the bottom of the W32Dasm you should see something like this:

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