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Comment by Benjamin_Dobell | Hacker News Reader

> So I was able to use the utility to discover and defeat the trial protection of itself.

This is why I used to feel bad for Hex Rays / IDA Pro. When your product is a disassembler, there's bound to be someone in your target audience capable of cracking your software.

P.S. Don't use a cracked IDA Pro. Checkout Hopper instead. It's reasonably priced and really solid software. Been using it on and off for years.

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I'd suggest checking out Binary Ninja [1] as well. Also reasonably priced and very solid, but available on all platforms --- not to mention having a much nicer UI and API than all the other tools out there.

[1] https://binary.ninja

Disclosure: I'm currently an intern working on the product.

My Google-fu is failing me at the moment, but I remember a piece of malware actually included the copyright string of a disassembler so it would detect "itself" and not let you analyze the malware sample.

Hey mike_d, I remember this as well. Using my google-fu, I found it. Google: "hopper disassembler" copyright text OR string

https://alexomara.com/blog/a-silly-anti-disassembly-trick/

backup links:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210830080742/https://alexomara...

https://archive.is/uzga3

From the article:

> One of the limitations to at-least the demo of Hopper is that it is not able to disassemble itself.

I was curious as to whether this limitation was present in the latest licensed version of Hopper (4.8.2).

I can confirm that I can indeed disassemble Hopper itself. Whether there's some intentional mistakes in that disassembly I don't really have time to delve into, unfortunately.

Going to show just how rudimentary said scanning is sometimes.

Nope, ghidra. Better disassembler

The inbuilt vtable detection is nice, you don't have to remember to update and run Class Informer every time you want to look at a vtable...

Cracking IDA Pro used to be part of the experience.

For me it was Numega's SoftICE, which was an amazing debugger. Using it to defeat it's own protection always struck me as ironic, but I guess also to be expected.

I hacked software for many years, for my personal amusement rather than profit, as it always reminded me of being a teenager hacking games for infinite lives, etc.

Now and again I take a stab at commercial linux software, but there isn't so much out there with the standard "Enter License Key" kinda protection.

> as it always reminded me of being a teenager hacking games for infinite lives, etc

Now you have Cheat Engine[1] specializing just on that

[1] https://cheatengine.org/

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