Stop this at once. Ableton folks are gonna go hungry
Reverse engineering a software crack
61–70 of 95 posts
Re: Reverse engineering a software crack
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The macOS cracking scene is also much much weaker. It's 1. Mildly harder on a OS level 2. Less popular in countries that produce the most cracks 3. Less popular in general 4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software 5. Has less strong reverse engineering software. Hopper was awful. Also, I just wanted to say I love your work. I've learned a lot from your blog, your free trial strategies ar…
ida pro has a Mac release
As does Ghidra or Binary Ninja.
Re: Reverse engineering a software crack
#63What is interesting here is that a signed piece of software can pick up an unsigned dll, execute it, and that execution causes a compromise of the system.
Raymond Chen has a ton of "being on the other side of the airtight hatchway" articles. Most relevant I found: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200420-00/?p=10... Probably in this case the installation of the crack requires admin privileges to modify files in "Program Files" folder. Boom, you've broken the rules ;)
Turns out that building the airtight hatchway halfway through the crew’s sleeping quarters was a bad decision.
Re: Reverse engineering a software crack
#64All the swearing turned me off. I don't mind cussing and use them myself, but does every tweet need to drop the f bomb?
Re: Reverse engineering a software crack
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
For sure, it’s just a bit more effort to reverse the app binary and find that part of the code. Enough effort to deter most crackers apparently.
The macOS cracking scene is also much much weaker. It's 1. Mildly harder on a OS level 2. Less popular in countries that produce the most cracks 3. Less popular in general 4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software 5. Has less strong reverse engineering software. Hopper was awful. Also, I just wanted to say I love your work. I've learned a lot from your blog, your free trial strategies ar…
> 4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software
The flip side of this is that I've noticed software written solely for macOS/iOS is often more polished than many of the most popular FOSS projects written for Linux.
Obviously I don't have any expectation of software provided for free, but as someone who makes a living developing software I do find it funny how much reticence there is among other developers to pay for high quality software.
Re: Reverse engineering a software crack
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like this person is trying to copy Foone's voice but just doesn't get it
Cybersec twitter is just awful. Everything has to be a call out or a dunk on someone/some company. It's all so negative.
As the saying goes, there's a fine line between genius and insanity... and a lot of these people are sitting on it.
Re: Reverse engineering a software crack
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The macOS cracking scene is also much much weaker. It's 1. Mildly harder on a OS level 2. Less popular in countries that produce the most cracks 3. Less popular in general 4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software 5. Has less strong reverse engineering software. Hopper was awful. Also, I just wanted to say I love your work. I've learned a lot from your blog, your free trial strategies ar…
> 4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software The flip side of this is that I've noticed software written solely for macOS/iOS is often more polished than many of the most popular FOSS projects written for Linux. Obviously I don't have any expectation of software provided for free, but as someone who makes a living developing software I do find it funny how much reticence there is among ot…
I am a developer who likes to be paid for my work. I was also a diehard FOSS fan. I've also switched to macOS, and after I did so I spent probably $200 on software. What was interesting to me is that even in my Linux phase, some proprietary software was acceptable — notably steam. Why was this the case?
I think, as a developer, I value the ability to fix things I don't like. I've done it quite a lot in open source software. Just plant my fix and move on. Steam always felt complete. macOS software often feels closer to completion, though sometimes I do wish I could modify it still. Also, another class is software I trust that I could not do a better job on, like Affinity.
Anyway, I think that's the root of the developer aversion to paying for software.... Well, for me anyway. I wish we had better culture around donating to free software as well.
Re: Reverse engineering a software crack
#68It’s done in a similar way on macOS: a dylib is added to the bundle and an LC_LOAD command is added to the app binary. The dylib is the first thing that runs because of using the constructor attribute, like this: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Injecting%20a%20DYLIB%20into%... The nice thing is that a signed app will refuse to load a dylib that does not have the same signature. So crackers will be forced to change the…
This is different though, because it's modifying the executable to load the new lib, right?
If you're modifying the executable anyway, why not just patch it directly instead of going through these hoops?
The equivalent on Linux would be setting LD_PRELOAD and putting your .so file there. A quick Google search seems to imply that the OSX equivalent is DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES but I have no idea how similar they are.
Re: Reverse engineering a software crack
#69All the swearing turned me off. I don't mind cussing and use them myself, but does every tweet need to drop the f bomb?
Yes, it does
Re: Reverse engineering a software crack
#70I found this pretty insufferable to read, and in good X fashion, the second comment from the top is "we should teach llama3 to do this stuff!".
Thanks for sharing, it was interesting, but wow that's a bad format and bad writing.