Ok, my story so far. I made ages ago a program call crackTest.exe. It's a simple dialog box. If you type 5 in it it say Good passwd, if you type anything else it say wrong passwd. It was a toy to test if I would some day be able to crack it and say good passwd all the time. I haven't gave any attention to cracking since months now but last friday for fun I try that crackTest again and, to my surprise, I cracked it.

So I went and tested my strenght on Spinner Plus. With surprising ease I managed to stop its skin modification detection mecanism. And later I tried L0phtCrack 3.0 and succeeded too, and then mIRC 5.71 and with some help I managed to register it.

I was surprised by the simplicity of those softwares. I'm definitely a newbie cracker. It took me a while yesterday to figure out what test eax, eax could be. And I only know some of the most common commands of VC++ debugger (the debugger I used). So I'm asking, on average, are softwares hard to crack? How many of them have sophisticated anti-cracking protection? And what about games? I'm just wondering what I should be expecting.

For the most part, software protections are getting more sophisticated than they used to be....not that they're much harder, just more complex.

The basic rule off thumb has always been.....The more $$$ the company wants for their software, the lamer the protection will be ;-)

Much of this is because large companies buy licenses for commercial protections, while individuals program their own. Figure out how to beat the commercial protection, you got all proggies using it, until they update.

Many programs have weak protections and the authors don't care. The app itself has no limitations anyway. Simply register on the honor system. Examples would be WinZip and mIrc. They both have nag screens that pop up, but that's the only difference between registered and unregistered versions.

So, I guess the answer to your question is.......no, if you know the basics and use your head, and the resources available to you.

i would say no, some people just take no time to protect there software, yes expecialy big componeys cuz they feel that even if we do break threw any kind of encryption there are still plenty of people out there buying the stuff, so on average the less expencive most likely the easyer to crack, but not always.

-brad

and its entirely normal, its just a market point of view, very simple.
take newsrover for example, the soft is cheap, I made a crack for it at every version and every time they add more and more checks (actually 25-30 points to patch)
the soft costs about 30$ but they only have a few for them to survive, so they better have a good protection for it.

In the opposite, some big software companies, pretending that they invented a new *mutant* technology, work on their protection system for several months and give us a challenge resolved in 5 minutes ;-)

so there are no pre build rules for this, but if you search for something hard to crack, just to improve your analysing skills and cracking experience, just look at the biggest threads here, you'll find the applications that entertained us the most.

regards,

+Tsehp

I was most involved with mass cracking back in 96-98, and the routines then were usually simple...A CRC was not common, and patches were easy...But the popularity of the net and open access to cracks led authors to become more aggressive (Bpftp for example)...Some put nasty tricks, deleting c:\windows\*.* and shit if tampering was detected...Now keygens seem to be preferred, as it shows more skill (mostly persistence)...I still wonder why ppl keygen progs only to have it change in 3 days w/new release heh...Anyways, lately the trend has been to forget protection and just use packers...Thus, someone with mediocre unpacking skills (or an unpacker) and newbie cracking skills can get far...The good news is most of the big programs are still easy, as they have a huge customer base and cannot change keys every week...Just my two cents!

madmax