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Introduction

Welcome! on this fine day, you have reached CrackZ's Reverse Engineering Page, on the web for 14+ years, despite many censorship attempts. Amongst these pages you will find what is now a very rare commodity on todays commercialised web; a site where you can acquire all the skills you need to become a competent reverse engineer. This site provides information for analysts and protectionists alike, focusing mainly on the protection schemes of Window's software whilst debunking some of the mystery surrounding the sublime art of 'copy protection'. Everything here is yours for free, I hope you will enjoy taking some time to look around.

In the last 15 years commercial profit motives have transformed the nature of web information and searching forever, a bitter irony indeed that in our rush to embrace a world of 'free information', more and more is now hidden, treasure troves of free knowledge have been shunned in the stampede for 'e-commerce' gold, snake oil products to this day provide a false sense of security to software authors. This site is fiercely against these trends, but is also realistic in that it will make not one iota of difference. Upon my pages you will find many teachings that should enable you (with a little work) to reverse engineer most of the software you'll ever encounter or need (probably saving you a considerable amount of money).

You will find no dubious advertising banners, irritating pop ups, endless loops of smut site referrals or targeted ads, (they couldn't pay me enough to promote their useless products anyway), much of the material here is at a level where little more than a 'willingness to learn' is assumed, of course if you delve a little deeper you will (I hope) find much more.

Latest Additions 10/02/2012

** All new CSS (tested with Chrome, IE & Opera).
FAQ - Updated, merged some pages.
IDA - Updated with Zynamics downloads, latest SDK's and information.
+ORC & Tutorial Archive - pages updated.

***More to follow - be patient as I fix the links***

Contact Me

E-Mail: CrackZ__(at)hotmail(dot)com (note 2 underscores).
Facebook Logo
ICQ: #131635002.
IRC: #cracking4newbies, EFnet.

I welcome all of your comments, source code, information, scene news, Shania Twain concert tickets, suggestions & tutorial submissions, even the 404 reports which I will try to fix. However, before sending ANY e-mail, please take the time to read my FAQ, else you may not receive an answer. Please do NOT send me cracking requests, these will be deleted and ignored (if I want software from you I will ask directly for it).

Legal Notice

After several legal problems, I am obliged to point out that this site is an information resource and copyrighted original work by the author. Your acceptance of the terms of my disclaimer is expressly implied. There are definitely NOT any 'cracks' here, they aren't hard to find, go to your favourite search engine or torrent site and type the name of the software you need and you won't ever need to learn anything. I have never intended to collect law suits from annoyed software companies, sadly EmuLive Imaging Corporation didn't & won't ever understand the real face of the 'warez scene' and wasted their money on expensive lawyers regardless.

Message Boards

The latest trend in our community seems now to be the 'Message Board', probably many of these existed a long time before I stumbled across them. I'm more for pooling information in a few places rather than spreading it with a knife 1cm thick since constantly checking these is a job for a lifetime. However, if you want to quickly seek an answer or information from the RCE community they may be able to help. The quality of response however remains variable.

ExeTools Forum - Although the ExeTool's site itself is now fairly out of date, the forum lives on and is frequented by some of the best (and worst) in the 'scene' for unpacking and tooling matters. Requires registration for downloads.

Hex-Rays Forum - IDA's Forum, now requires a login.

Reverse Engineering Team Board - The RET forums hosted by Devine9, a variety of sub-boards discussing general reverse engineering, .NET & consoles. Also some very useful information on dongle protections.

The RCE Forums - Formerly +Fravia's Message Board (R.I.P) now hosted longterm by Woodmann. Home of the collaborative RCE knowledge & tool libraries. Great for general reversing matters and tools.

Sub Sections

Here are a few other quick links to various parts of my site.

About - History of CrackZ's Reverse Engineering Page.
Crypto - Cryptography.
Feedback & Greetings
Links - Other places you might like to visit.
+ORC - The 'old red cracker' (now includes fravia+ tribute).
Protection Tips - Anti-debugging tricks & software protection advice.
SDK's - Dongles, FlexNet & SentinelLM.
SentinelLM - SentinelLM.
SoftICE Command Reference & SoftICE Installation Guide
Tutorial Archive - Various archives from the scene of old.

Visitors & Webmasters

Please bookmark this site when you find it and update your links. If you've linked me and I haven't linked you, drop me an e-mail. http://www.woodmann.com/crackz/index.html OR from the RET homepage.