 Friends
& Resources +HCU Miscellaneous
Security & Tool Links |
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Friends
& Resources +HCU Miscellaneous
Security & Tool Links |
Well here you have my dedicated links page which a long time back when I first started on the web (1997 sometime) were all placed on my main page. Unfortunately this became unwieldy in a matter of a few months and shifting them here allows me some more freedom to comment the links (a link without a comment is a pointless link imho), sadly this page also means I have yet another excuse to forget about all of my friends and these sites for extended periods of time, translation; you might have to use a search engine to find these resources.
In the early days of my site, decent web resources for reverse engineering were few and far between, at some stages Fravia's fortress / LordCaligo and a few others seemed like the only places worth visiting, this changed in around 1999 when groups and many individuals became more open with regards to sharing information, a change that I largely welcome. All of the sites I link too have something unique to offer, some haven't been updated in perhaps 2 years, yet you should peruse them and probably take your own copies to burn on a CD archive somewhere (reverse engineering sites can disappear at any given time but their knowledge is priceless).
It goes without saying that you should pay these sites a visit as I do myself (although on rather an infrequent basis).
(tHE) aNALYST's Site - Frozen site in 2003 by a very capable french reverser / hacker who made a career out of key generating and VB protection busting, now he's working on the other side of the fence for a well-known protection ;-). There are some good snippets of information here amongst the 40 tutorials. aNALYST is (or was) also a member of UCF but he's almost totally inactive scene-wise these days in favour of real world commitments, many of you in the scene will now know that he has gone on to many greater things ;-).
AntiCrack Deutschland - (Now home to Damn Vulnerable Linux - interesting site). Previously described itself as an internet portal for reverse engineering and scientific research. A very popular site hosting / featuring a large amount of essays and news with a well organised search facility. However, much of the material here presented 'as new' is actually very old and I wonder sometimes whether there is some sort of automated spider simply 'grabbing' old essays from various reverse engineering sites to "feature" them. Nevertheless, you can find just about everything you need here including a lot of the scenes best crackers.
Bomber Monkey's Lair - Another friend of mine and very capable reverse engineer who has since digressed from his roots into the more mathematical arena. He has a new site and I find his ramblings quite interesting, also a few documents on his site are pretty much 'must reads' imho, especially the guide to 'not sucking' as well as his advice to protection authors.
c0rns0up - Long standing friend and all-round great guy, remember CoRN2's guide to assembly?, finally an archive can be downloaded here (648k).
Crashtest's Links (link dead) - A formerly good resource (circa 2002), this repository by Crashtest should save you copying/pasting all those url's you have found interesting and then lost or forgotten. Now you'll find probably only cached copies of the page, it might however still be useful for tracking down very old sites.
DREAD Reverse Engineering - Former reverse engineering team (based in the Netherlands), the acronym is 'Dutch Reverse Engineering Artistic Decipherians', this is their final archive site as they ceased being in early 1999. Times change, people change and I leave this link purely as a testament to good times long ago. I miss some of these guys.
EliCZ's "Hello, coder" - Great system programming reference site plus information you won't find anywhere else on aspects of NT/2K/XP security. EliCZ's site is one of the few sites with example ASM source for a kernel mode driver. If you plan on digging through internals, chances are EliCZ has done it and documented it already and you can save yourself considerable time reading his work.
ExeTools - ExeTools (the site) stopped being updated around 2002, essentially it started out as a ProTools clone. Now its more famous for its forum, where many useful snippets and tools can be downloaded that cannot be easily found anywhere else. Aaron also runs a FTP with all the tools a reverser could ever need, however you will need to contribute significantly to gain access.
FlWright!'s Website - FLW finally redesigned his site in 2004, however it appears to me he has abandoned it, his old mirror used to have several tutorials, a chat room and his own tools FlashIt & Password Ripper, this new site might just be heavily under construction but I don't hold out much hope of it being updated anytime soon, expect it to disappear into the void.
Fravia's SearchLores (Europe) - A great site imho, focusing on searching techniques and lores with information hidden inside the myriad of intertwined pages, although you'll have to be quite discerning with what you find on Fravia's site ;-). Make what you will of Fravia's editorial style but don't ever doubt his talent for web publishing. Late in 1999 Fravia gave up his fortress for a plethora of reasons, I will not speculate on them here but I understand them, I also received a very supportive e-mail from him at the time my site was under siege (to this day he also links to my site). Fravia is/was/remains a very controversial character in the great 'scene' of things, I personally have always viewed him as a pleasant eccentric, I wish him every success with his new direction. Mirror Site US.
f0dder's site - Small repository of pure reverse engineering information, even though there are a mere 6 or so papers on his site, all are worth reading. f0dder is also very active on the Win32 assembly forums. These days f0dder is web-idle.
KroBar's Tutorial Collections - Accumulated reverse engineering repository of just about every tutorial you could possibly ever require. If you are starting out or just perusing the web this central repository should be very useful. KroBar also links to just about every reverse engineering site you could ever wish to visit. Last updated January 2003.
Iczelion's Win32 ASM Page - Superb repository assembled by Iczelion proving that for some coders Win32 ASM is alive and kicking (although one feels that as a serious development platform it is now dead). I personally recommend Iczelion's own ASM tutorials (if MASM biased) and also his very good guide to writing a VxD. Simply a great site although one notices some tutorial phrases borrowed from some books ;-).
Immortal Descendants (The) - Link de-activated (there is an archive on the web). They didn't link me in the final stages of their site but I still kind of link them, such is life ;-). A very good collaborative page dedicated to reverse engineering with fine resources, including CrackMe's, tools and tutorials + several useful search engines. ID has since been retired, its founders am4 and Volatility have departed the scene.
NeuRaL_NoiSE - Sara's site, a small repository yet what it lacks in quantity is certainly made up for in quality, especially the creation of HNotePad and the IAT hook (2 classic concept tutorials). A very knowledgable reverser resides here and your missing out if you don't read his/her work. Last updated April 2002.
Reverse Engineering Team (RET) - Collaborative team of reverse engineers with a lot of ideas (I'm a member ;-), now go figure that one out). Expect to see CrackMe's and .NET focused information / tools from this team.
See4N - The faces behind C4N (1997-2005), if you've ever visited #cracking4newbies on EFNet then maybe you'd like to put some faces to names (or at least have a guess anyway). The site is now administered by kw, before you ask, my picture is NOT on there ;-).
Sysinternals - Home of some fantastic freeware from Bryce Cogswell & Mark Russinovich.
yAtEs - Repository of reverse engineering related material, areas covered include PE/VxD/Unpacking and Training. Newbies could do far worse than download his TUG ;-). yAtEs is also very active in the gaming protection field.
ytc's Cracking Library - A well presented page with several key tools and some featured tutorials from both ytc and other good reversers. Now very out of date and here once again as a testament to a scene that once was.
You might like to also visit good sites such as The Snake (tutorials from 1998) & zouzouni (the creator of my fine logo).
Aesculapius - A very good page to visit, maintained by an equally great reverse engineer. Here you'll find many interesting code and cracking snippets as well as a fine tools page (when Aesc updates it). A strict educator, many of you will remember Aesculapius from the 1998 and Millennium +HCU strainers. The books project also appears to be back up and running ;-) although Aesc appears to have very little time these days.
reverser's Page of Reverse Engineering - (formerly Fravia) & now maintained by +Tsehp. Home of the +HCU (Higher Cracking University) with more essays than you can shake a stick at. Compelling reading for all reversers and protectionists alike.
Greythorne the Technomancer - Related to Fravia+, Greythorne's page is the best site to retrieve the legendary +ORC teachings, with the added advantage of being able to download the pertinent files. There are many subtle snippets of information which can be retrieved here (gij's MineSweeper project is certainly one) and +gthorne is a really helpful individual as anyone will tell you. The reality however is that he doesn't seem to be updating his site to regularly and has probably quit active reverse engineering.
Mammon_'s NEW site - Mammon_'s new page contains a wealth of useful information and has now been updated to focus totally on coding and real reversing exploits (I really love it). To this day I still recommend everyone read Mammon_'s tales to his alleged Grandson's (IDA & SoftICE) and also check out his collection of IDC scripts. Underrated by the scene, this is one of the best repositories you are ever likely to find and Mammon_ is perhaps one of most knowledgable reversers you might ever hope to meet.
Programmer's Tools (Kaparo) - One of the best maintained archives of tools for programmers. Naturally there are also many useful programs for reverse engineers here too (the tool site bar none since its kept up to date with quite chilling regularity ;-) ).
Sandman's Page (link dead) - Hosting 75 tutorials, Sandman's site is a fine resource and if you are a newbie this is still one of the best resource sites out there and must be visited. Sandman himself no longer hosts 'icecreams' and now updates fairly infrequently, perhaps another reverser who has disappeared into the void.
Adobe Acrobat - Useful for reading those very fashionable PDF documents like the SoftICE manuals and many others.
AVP & Norton AV - (download the trial versions). Needless to say you do understand why having a virus-free system is a good idea don't you :-).
Dilbert - Is your office manned by corporate drones?, are you fed up of hearing meaningless buzzwords for the blatently obvious?, or are you having difficulty understanding why most management is certifiably brain dead?, Dilbert is for you.
DOSBox - Ever wanted to play all of those DOS classic games (Dune 2?) under your Windows 2K/XP and have full mouse and sound support, this is all you will ever need.
Gens - Play old classic games from your mispent youth with the best Sega Genesis Emulator out there, if you want to wile away a few hours then download the classic game "Shining In The Darkness", the end-game music alone should go down as an all time classic.
HyperSnap v2.7 - Very old version of this great screen grabbing utility that I still use today, of course removing its banal protection and licensing it for yourself worldwide should take no longer than about 30 seconds (272k).
IceExt v0.70 - Sten's excellent SoftICE extension (development now discontinued).
iDEFENCE Labs - Research and development page. Includes a lot of very useful open source tools for vulnerability research as well as several IDA plugins (IDA Sync).
Mostek's IDA Plug-Ins - Superb extensions for IDA.
NirSoft - Very nice collection of freeware password recovery and system utilities.
Paint Shop Pro 6 - JASC's definitive shareware graphics tool (large range of supported graphics formats), I still personally use v5.0 (previous versions if you can find them are even better, before the MFC bloat).
Pegasus Imaging Corporation - Home of The JPEG Wizard (a great tool for shrinking JPEG's), I use v1.3.5 and the protection remains unchanged from the earlier version discussed elsewhere on my site.
Project guliverkli - The best ever version of MS Windows Media Player was v6.4 that was included with Windows 98/NT, unfortunately MS decided to descend down a dark path of bloatware from Media Player 7 onwards. Of course v6.4 wasn't updated to support the newer media file formats and required diehard v6.4 users to hunt for various CODEC's, this project extends the classic v6.4 and should be considered a must for your system.
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The only site you'll ever need to become a Shania Twain worshipper. In fact once you visit here you might never return to my site again ;-). |
Software Analysts - Security 'consultants' for software developers, their site discusses in some detail protection schemes available today, they also offer services for protectionists (at a price). These people are almost certainly ex-crackers now wearing white hats.
The IDA Palace - IDC scripts, papers & tutorials for extending IDA.
Virtual Calc 2000 - Old but fantastic application for performing bignum calculations, also has a protection scheme you can beat in about 2 minutes ;-).
WinRAR & WinZip - Compression programs of choice (used by 90% of webmasters).
http://61.241.82.201:22366/ - Assembly language and programming resources (e-books).
GRC (Gibson Research Corporation) - Home of 'self-proclaimed' security and marketing expert Steve Gibson. GRC is a classic example of where a few crumbs of knowledge have been stretched into FUD of the worst kind (look up the acronym if you aren't familiar with it). Steve does have some good things to offer but much of what he has written recently is a complete crock (imho), his serious investigative piece on DDOS attacks purpetrated by 13 year old kids with sub7 on IRC had me positively rolling with laughter. Read the grcsucks.com website if you wan't an alternative view.
LSD-PLaNET - The official website of the Last Stage of Delirium Research Group.
OpenRCE - Research oriented site specifically for reverse engineers. Lots of the most well known names in the security world post articles and maintain blogs here, well worth a visit.
SecurityFocus - Definitive security site, home to the Bugtraq mailing lists, (since acquired by Symantec). Would be hackers and admins should look here to stay abreast of current vulnerabilities.
VASM Links - Visual Assembler IDE links, more assembly language resources.
Think your site or perhaps another should be here?, maybe you've linked me and I've not linked or visited you?, well drop me an e-mail and I'll graciously add your site here.
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