The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

A while ago, I came across this blog: Levis’s Little Blog about Reverse Code Engineering (RCE) | All about Reverse Code Engineering.

It is of a beginning reverse engineering guy, doing reverse engineering of parts of application code, and being part of a REPT scene publishing key generators and crackers of software.

I think the interesting part is not so much his skill level, but has these aspects:

• his choice of tools and how he develops skills tells you much about the scene and how they work
• examining the keygens, cracks, etc, tells you a lot about how well the software is that we write
• the abundance of people like him and the available tools basically void every copy protection scheme you can imagine

Part of his toolset are come from a few video tutorials he posted about, where this is in the context menu of a .EXE file:

• Browse with .NET Reflector
• Compression with MPress
• Scan with DNid
• Encrypt with Exe Guarder
• Load into PE editor (LordPE)
• Open with CFF Explorer
• Open with OllyDbg
• RDG Packer Detector
• Open using Resource Hacker
• Scan with PEid
• Stud PE Analyze
• Compress with UPC
• Exe Info PE scan
• Scan With ProtectionID

The fun is that many of these tools can be used for dual purpose, and I’m fine with that.

One of the tools not on his list is XN Resource Editor, which I like a lot to get icon resources correct.

–jeroen