A prominent International ring of software crackers called The Phrozen Crew has subverted the Australian product, ISYS HindSite. Formed in the early 90s from a loose association of experienced program crackers, the Phrozen Crew claim to be the biggest cracking group on the Internet. This notorious band now claims 4,103 victims to their cracking credit.

'Cracking' is the process of hackers breaking copy-protection or time-restriction mechanisms in commercial products, and then publishing the means of doing so. Virtually any program can be cracked, including those using hardware-based protection schemes such as dongles.

ISYS HindSite is available in a feature-restricted, time-limited version to freely download from the Odyssey Development web site.

"We’d noticed our HindSite downloads had taken a leap for no apparent reason. There had been no recent press on the product, so we were puzzling as to why the sudden increase, when a phone call from Denver explained it all," said Senior Developer, Ian Davies.

One of the technicians in Odyssey's Denver office had noticed talk of the ISYS HindSite crack in a newsgroup. He immediately notified the Sydney developers who replaced the restriction code, but Davies is not optimistic about this solving the problem. "When we learned HindSite had been cracked by this prominent ring, we immediately beefed up our time-restriction scheme and uploaded new software to our FTP site. The new scheme is far more sophisticated than the last, but I don't doubt it will be attacked again, if not by the same group, then by someone else."

Cracking is usually most prevalent amongst high-value software products, such as AutoCad, and game software.

Crackers are more than just mindless vandals. Most are reasonably skilled programmers, and some are inordinately talented. The amount of effort involved in circumventing a good protection scheme is very substantial, and when you visit the cracking newsgroups, you see less talented people asking for cracks for all sorts of things. The crackers respond to these requests, put in the long hours or weeks, and then freely publish the crack. The motivation is clearly the challenge plus the ego trip of being the first to crack a particular piece of software.

Members of The Phrozen Crew are anonymous, known only by pseudonyms, and their motto is "We always get what we want."

"When we put the time-restriction into HindSite, we didn't bother getting too sophisticated because we really didn't expect anyone to go to the effort of cracking a piece of software with such a modest purchase price. Moreover, we impose no limits on how many times individuals can download the free version, so people can continue with free usage of HindSite simply by downloading a new copy every few months", said Davies.

Despite many people accessing the HindSite software for free, Odyssey Development had the last laugh on the code crackers. "Our free download version is not only time-restricted, but also lacks a couple of important features present in the purchased version. So even though they may circumvent our time-restriction, there's no way they can gain access to the features that simply are not present in the executable," said Davies, "The only way round it is to buy the product."

ISYS HindSite is an Internet surfer companion product that remembers everywhere you’ve been and everything you’ve seen on the web and gets you back there. It won BYTE magazine’s "Best of Comdex" award at its debut in Las Vegas in 1995. Like all ISYS products, HindSite’s lynch pin is an index. HindSite creates an index of everything it reads on sites visited, which then updates as the user visits more sites. The free, time-restricted demo version of HindSite does not contain the more advanced elements of the product. For example, it does not provide for restricting the size of the HindSite index, as Odyssey doesn’t intend for it to be used for very long. A cracked version’s index will continue to grow and grow, with no means of controlling the index size.

The complete version, which can be purchased over the Internet for $29-95AU allows users to specify HindSite index size. A user might choose to have an index limit of twelve months. This would allow you to access sites visited over a twelve-month period, but HindSite would restrict its index to that length of time, performing regular purges.