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- Written by - george
- Email - george@pentire2.demon.co.uk
- Date written - 10th March 1999
-
- Program Details:
- Name - VBCrackMe v2.0
- Author - Eternal Bliss
- Language - Visual Basic 6.0
-
- Tools Used - SmartCheck
-
- Cracking Method - Observation, Hunches, Guessing, luck in general really.
-
- Viewing Method - Notepad with word wrap.(full screen preferably)
-
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-
- Protection System:
- Based on a serial number of undefined length.
-
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-
- SmartCheck SetUp:
- Have a look at EB's early tuts and all will be revealed.
-
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-
- The Essay:
- Load up the CrackMe in SC, and press F5 to start the program.
- Have a look at what pops up......
- Nothing of any real interest there.......
-
- Type in your serial number, in my case, 'george123', then press Register.
-
- "Wrong!Try Again!!" (A little hopeful, wasn't it?)
-
- Okay....
-
- Highlight "command1_click" (by left clicking on it once).
- Click on VIEW up the top there, then click on show all events.
- Open up "command1_click" by clicking on the "+" next to it.
-
- WOW! That is alot of info.
-
- For the purposes of this tut I will pick out the lines I think are of interest.
-
- If you scroll down the page a bit (in SC that is, not this tut), you should see lines
- that bear more than a passing resemblance to these.
-
- Mid(VARIANT:String:"george12...",long:1,VARIANT:Integer:1)
- __vbaStrVarVal(VARIANT:String:"g") returns DWORD:410414
- Asc(String:"g") returns integer:103
-
-
- In the first line "long:1" is grabbing the 1st letter;
- In the second line, there it is, "g";
- In the third line "g" is being converted to its decimal value, "103".
-
- We can see the same thing being repeated further down the listing,
- except with "long:1" being replaced with "long:,2,3,4,etc...",
- and "g....103" being replaced with other letters and their respective decimal values.
-
- If we look a bit further down again you will see the line:
-
- __vbaStrVal(VARIANT:String:"10310111...") returns DWORD:4104D0
-
- If you left click on it and look at the right window, you will see "georg" converted into
- decimal and squished together (103101111114103).
-
- "That is all well and good," I hear you say, "But I know what I entered in."
-
- Well, if you look further down the listings you can see another whole bunch of numbers which
- don't seem to have anything to do with anything....
-
- "116104", "64104", "84104105...", "10511532", etc, etc.....
-
- If you left click on the numbers which are incomplete (have "..." after them) and have a look
- at the right window, you can see the complete number.
-
- Now, you will recognise the "103101111114103" from earlier, but what are all the other numbers?
-
- What if you were to try and convert the decimals to letters?
-
- Let's try that....
-
- "116104" ---> "th"
- "84104" ---> "Th"
- "8410410511532" ---> "This_"(in this case "_" means " "(space))
- "10511532" ---> "is_"
- "99111" ---> "co"
- "114" ---> "r"
- "10132" ---> "e_"
- "1141019911632" ---> "rect_"
- "100101" ---> "de"
-
- This doesn't make too much sense on it's own, however if you start rearranging it you should be
- able to make out a phrase:
-
- "This is the correct code"
-
- Let's try entering that as our code....
-
- Hurrah....
- 'Crack' open the bubbly!
-
-
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-
-
- Congrats, apologies and thanks time:
-
- Congrats to me for writing my first tut.
- Apologies if it makes no sense.
- Thanks for taking the time to read it.
-
- Apologies to EB for stealing the essay layout (I was never very good at English Lang. in
- school, essay structure and the like), and also for stumbling across the solution instead of
- doing it the "correct" way.(Hey, whoever said there was a "right" or a "wrong" way to crack
- a program.)
-
- Thanks to EB and Sandman for their sites which are a wealth of knowledge.
-