Forward
Greetings
once again, and welcome to the November 99 issue of the zine :) I'd like to
thank all of you for all your comments and suggestions from the past issues.
I've listened to them all, and will be making several changes. For one, any
solutions to "Protections of the Month" will be available separately
from the zine's. What was I thinking??? Also, scene news can be rather tough
to come across sometimes... if anything of interest comes up, please let me
know! As usual, please feel free to e-mail me your comments and/or criticisms:
Volatility@ImmortalDescendants.com
Enjoy!
Volatility
Scene
News
It's been a BORING month!
Just a couple notes:
- Fravia's site is frozen for those of you who still don't know (not temporarily,
but PERMANENTLY)
- Several of the (former?) +HCU students are intending to keep the essay's
database going, on a new site.
- +Sandman has organized a project dealing with collecting reversing sites,
and burning them to CD's, in order to preserve our knowledge for the future.
The way the web changes, and websites come and go these days, I commend all
involved for the idea. For more information on this project, visit +Sandman's
Newbie Forum.
Protection Of The Month
This month's protection
is X-NetStat Professional, available at http://www.arez.com/fs/xns/.
This program is a nifty little port monitor, that you can use to see exactly
who is connecting to your machine. No hints this time... give it a shot!
Tool
Of The Month
If you're a fan of HIEW (Hacker's View Hex Editor), than you'll love this
month's tool. Though not necessarily brand new, this tool has just been discovered
and tested by myself and several others. It's unimaginatively called BIEW,
and it's interface is similar to HIEW's... but there are MANY more options
and tools to be found... not to mention, it's FREEWARE! Give BIEW a try...
you can find it here:
http://www.voshod.com/~nick/biew.html.
This site can be rather slow, so you can also find it at
http://protools.cjb.net.
Commercial
Stupidity
Once again, another example of stupidity... will they ever learn? I doubt
it, and hope not... quite amusing! This example was submitted by Torn@do.
I suggest you don't waste your time downloading and reversing this app, as
you won't learn anything. It's here for humor purposes :)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Greetings Volatility,
I've just cracked a program which is owned by commerical stupidity .... as
you might want to publish it in the AWESOME e-zine, I thought I should write
some lines for other people to LAUGH at the 'protection'.
Program: Black List 1.9
Author: UtilMind SH
Website: http://www.angelfire.com/yt/utilmind/index.html
First something about the program itself: "Black List will detect and "kill"
those annoying popup windows from any web site you want. Black List will sit
in the system tray bar and will automatically close popups from Geocities,
Tripod, Angelfire, Free Prohosting, Hypermart and any other site."
And now something about what the authors says about it: "Black List is SHAREWARE.
It costs only 15 USD. The trial version allows user to run it 50 times. After
this term is expired, Black List will stop running."
I won't continue using it after (maximum) 10 times ... I have a tool (FREEWARE),
that is 1000 times better than that - called WebWasher by Siemens (www.siemens.de)
... I recommend using it.
Now about the real protection: By clicking on the icon and then pressing "About
and Register", you see a small field to enter serial number (case sensitive)
... well you know what it expects you to do? Yeah, go and search for "Registered"
in the EXE file ... As I searched for this, I found out that it looks up the
Registered Owner and Organization of your windows and assumed it uses this
for calculating the serial ... but as always I continued searching to find
out more :) Then I found after a few continues of search (about 2 continues)
the "Registered to" and "Unregistered version" ... and just in front of the
"Registered to" there was the real serial, which wasn't calculated from anything
...
The author tried to make it a little bit harder than just using numbers he
used things like 00 and FF and such in the serial (which he probably thought
of as anti-cracker serial, which I read something about ... LOL) Commerical
stupidity is still alive ...
~~~~~~~
TORN@DO
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Link
Of The Month
A new tool site! This site contains a rather large and unique selection of
tools, and offers an alternative to the overly-popular protools.cjb.net. The
site is called Player's Tools, and can be visited here:
http://playtools.cjb.net.
I've found this site to be a bit slow at times, so have patience :)
Interview
Of The Month
Is it interview time again? Article last month, so I guess
so :) This month's interview is with another member of DREAD (no, I'm not
being partial here... I just find these guys to be a very interesting bunch...
not to mention he was one of the few around when I had the time :) The interview
is with Steinowitz a.k.a. S^Witz. You can find DREAD at
http://dread99.cjb.net.
[Volatilit]
How long have you been in the reversing field, and what got you interested?
[S^witz] I've been in the reversing field for a little more than
one year now
[S^witz] Knotty told me about it and it fascinated me very much because
of the possibilities
[S^witz] my knowledge of ASM was zero, I didn't know anything about
it
[S^witz] it was cool to see what you could do with it
[Volatilit] What, do you feel, are some of your greatest (best in
your opinion) achievements (reversing-wise)?
[S^witz] hmm, difficult question
[Volatilit] any essays, tough protections, programs that you are
proud of?
[S^witz] I haven't written any essays on reversing, being webmaster
of DREAD already requires a lot of time
[S^witz] I once started on Oxford Molecular's CAChe
[S^witz] it's a HUGE program with HUGE dll's
[S^witz] and now I'm only talking about the security part of the
program :)
[S^witz] I didn't finish it, didn't like it anymore after a while
[S^witz] it did start without serial number, but it didn't fully
work
[Volatilit] On the topic of DREAD, everyone knows you're a whiz at
CGI, and have incorporated much into the site... any other notable CGI projects
you're proud of?
[S^witz] actually, yes, I wrote an Internet game
[S^witz] fully CGI, including on-the-fly graphics manipulation and
such things
[S^witz] but I won't give you the URL of that :)
[Volatilit] I understand :)
[S^witz] and I'm currently also working on the Cracking Tutorial
Search Engine, the project Tornado started
[S^witz] it worked, but I'm improving it to make it much easier to
administrate and use
[Volatilit] Nice :) What else, besides reversing and CGI do you do?
Any other current (or past) interests?
[S^witz] I'm not only a CGI/Perl coder, I also know how to code in
Visual Basic
[S^witz] but, as you can understand, I never use that knowledge anymore
[S^witz] the only use of that knowledge is when I'm reversing VB
programs
[S^witz] :)
[Volatilit] Does it bother you that so many people diss it as a lame
language?
[S^witz] no, it doesn't bother me, because it is a terrible language
when you're better
[Volatilit] hehehe
[S^witz] but I must admit that I wasn't aware of that either
[S^witz] when I didn't know other languages
[Volatilit] yeah, it's appeal to newbies to programming is hard to
resist
[S^witz] when you're better SHOULD BE when you know better :)
[S^witz] it can be very hard to convince VB-coders of the fact that
VB-code is NOT optimized :)
[Volatilit] on to other topics... what is the current status of DREAD,
your role in it, and what are your future directions?
[S^witz] DREAD is currently growing rather fast and we'll probably
try to reduce that
[S^witz] we'll be more strict in allowing new members, I think
[S^witz] I'm currently Coding Lab leader and webmaster, which takes
a lot of time
[S^witz] I haven't done any reversing myself for a long time, but
I started doing some reversing myself a couple of days ago
[S^witz] and I'll continue that
[S^witz] there are several plans for DREAD
[S^witz] our website, for example, will also change within too long
[S^witz] but I don't want to say too much about that now :)
[Volatilit] Understood :) It's refreshing to find another group that
is out just for the knowledge end of things... does it sadden you to see
so many lamers looking for just sites that host cracks/serials rather than
taking a bit of time to learn?
[S^witz] of course it does, it's so easy just to search for warez/crackz/serials
and use them. that's also why DREAD doesn't spread any of these three
[S^witz] besides, it's so easy to do it yourself in so many cases...
[S^witz] and it just feels better :)
[Volatilit] well, unless there's anything else you'd like to add,
I think I'll tie this interview up, with one final question :)
[Volatilit] What are your views of the current state of the reversing
community, and where do you think it's headed?
[S^witz] more and more newbies enter the world of reversing and I
don't know if that's good
[S^witz] more newbies isn't a problem, more lamers is :)
[S^witz] many people don't know anything, but they think they do
and that's wrong
[S^witz] it's not a problem when you're new, but don't pretend as
if you know everything
[S^witz] just listen and read
[S^witz] furthermore, things will change soon
[S^witz] the HCU isn't the HCU anymore...
[S^witz] and that will also impact the rest of the reversing community
[Volatilit] In what ways, do you think?
[S^witz] there's no longer a 'central' place where people can learn
[S^witz] knowledge will always be spread, but it will be more difficult
to find the knowledge you're looking for
[S^witz] reverse engineering groups like DREAD and Immortal Descendants
will become more important, I think
[Volatilit] Well, I thank you for your time Stein, and keep up the
good work :)
Credits,
Greetings
Thanks again, for checking
out this issue. I hope you've found it helpful, and interesting. Please don't
hesitate to send me your comments. Any additions for the next issue will be
MUCH appreciated.
Credits and thanks for this issue go to: Author of BIEW,
Authors of X-NetStat Pro, Player,
Steinowitz, Torn@do
Personal greetings fly out to: ACiD_BuRN, alpine, Corn, knotty, Latigo, LaZaRuS,
Lord Soth, Lucifer48, Neural, _pain, +Sandman, S^Witz, Tornado, WarezPup,
Yoshi, and everyone I forgot (probably MANY)