by Dan East » Jun 30, 2003 @ 2:57pm
Cracking at the simplest level just requires a Hex editor, and setting various bytes to 0. For example, to keep a message box from appearing, you can set the first character of the string to 0. The MessageBox routine will not show a window if it is passed a string of zero length. 0 is NOP, so you can prevent branches to other code by setting a 0, etc.
The idea of any protection scheme is two-fold. To prevent casual sharing from among typical users, and to prevent trivial hacks from breaking the protection (ie the types of hacking I mentioned above).
Dan East