Hey,

Looking for a little direction here. I'm playing around with unpacking/decrypting, but I need some experience. I can manually unpack the easier stuff (upx etc), but Armadillo etc is beyond me at the moment. Anyone able to offer some suggestions of things I should play with to get some experience?

Thanks.

Read Tutorials about unpacking Armadillo and follow the tutorial with target then if you did it time to go play alone... get the tutorial with a different target but still packed with armadillo and try to do it yourself with help of tutorial....practice practice alot with many programs and you would be an unpacking god

Hope that helps!

Well, I was under the impression that Armadillo was one of the hardest to break (based on some posts here too).

Should I be looking at Petite/Aspack etc? There are plenty of tutorials, but I like to learn myself/my own way. Plus, a lot of them were written by people who took l33t h4xX0r typing to heart, and thought grammar was optional

Different note. Just *how annoying* are progs that say "To register, use the Register option in Help Menu".... except the genius developers forgot to add that option in

You should move on to AsPack next (AsPack, not AsProtect), it's good practice when you are starting out. The other packers have too many tricks to learn the basics when are starting. AsPack doesn't have any fancy tricks of it's own, it just compresses and mods the IAT a little. So you can practice dumping and fixing the IAT, both core staples of unpacking work. All the other protections do the same thing but just add more bells and whistles (like debugger detection, CRC checks, dump prevention, etc.)

Once you have the basics down (dumping and IAT rebuilding) the rest become easier because those two basics are the most important.

-nt20

Thank you, exactly what I needed.